Good old-fashioned bus lanes on a freeway would be fine, but if the existing freeway needs major modification to do it the price may be unacceptable in a small urban area like Monterey. And major modification *is* necessary in many sections of 1. One upside is that there *is* a median to work with, if they wanted to build toll lanes (the usual method these days of doing bus lanes); cynically, the locals likely have enough money that they'd be happy to have the toll lanes limited to local transponders (not Fastrak) and buses only, preferably physically separated from the regular lanes, to keep the tourists out.

FWIW, Census data show the Monterey coastal places (Marina-Seaside-Sand City-Monterey-Pacific Grove-Del Rey Oaks-Del Monte Forest-Carmel) total between 90-100K population, with Salinas (very nearby inland) just under 120K. The rest of Monterey County is well-spread-out and mostly rural. That's the resident population of course; it's a major tourist destination, and the transient population can be considerable; that's what usually produces the traffic jams, on weekends, holidays, and vacation periods.

Also FWIW, the ideas of bus lanes AKA "BRT" and converting the rail line to bus lanes have been studied many times over the years, and have never penciled out. Just like resurrecting the rail line for actual rail. The trail segments are fairly popular as such, so moving or removing them for bus lanes would be a noisy process. MST and AMBAG may be studying it again, to keep things up to date, but I wouldn't expect much serious action.

Amusing: chez Google (MST's web site links to it for trip planning) it's possible to do a trip from Capitola (near where I used to live) to Carmel using Santa Cruz and Monterey-Salinas transit. Timing isn't any better than when I lived there in the last century: about 3.5 hours if all the transfers work. If traffic is moving, direct driving time sticking to the speed limit (haha) is a little over an hour.