> This assumes that cars are the only way to get around.
Which is true in many cases, and would take decades of construction to do anything about, e.g. because people would have to move out of the suburbs or else at least one end of the trip will require a car, which would require massive long-term new housing construction in urban areas and has no short-term solution.
> A bus that starts and stops as it goes through traffic calming with 100 people on it will make an absolute joke of the efficiency of even the most fuel efficient of cars.
A city bus will get around 5MPG. The most efficient cars get more than 50MPG, so a city bus isn't even as fuel efficient as the cars until it's carrying more than 10 passengers. In theory they can carry 30-40 passengers, but generally in practice they don't, and in theory that 50+MPG car can carry five or more passengers too.
> In areas where transit is given its own lane, or is a train, the time efficiency is much better as well.
"In areas where the time efficiency of car traffic is purposely degraded, car traffic has lower time efficiency" is kind of tautological, but that's a silly argument for doing it, especially when the proposed alternative isn't available, e.g. because one of the endpoints is in the suburbs and the bus doesn't go there.
> Plus if you give buses their own lanes you can remove traffic calming measures for them and give them signal priority, thus making them even more efficient from a resource, and time perspective.
It's kind of odd that the same people who talk about wasted space from parking want to allocate entire bus lanes worth of space for a vehicle that only uses them 0.2% of the time. Also, what are you proposing here? 50+MPH buses traveling next to bike lanes and pedestrians? It would have to be even higher than that, because the bus is constantly starting and stopping to pick up passengers (and is then stationary for several seconds), so to achieve an average speed of e.g. 30MPH, its cruising speed would have to be above 60MPH, which is not only dangerous if adjacent to pedestrians, it's extremely inefficient as you're repeatedly accelerating a huge bus to highway speeds and then back again.
When the alternative is a car traveling a constant 60MPH on a highway, the bus compares unfavorably in terms of both time and fuel efficiency.