When Viewing The Statistics, Follow The Money

On Sunday, Michael Barone posted an article at the Washington Examiner about mass transit in America. The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) announced last week that Americans use of public transportation was at an all-time high.

The chart below tells a different story:

So why would the American Public Transportation Association be telling us that ridership of public transportation is up? Well, it has to do with the way highway funds are distributed.

The article explains:

APTA is promoting the idea of a transit boom because it would like to see lots of federal money continue to be spent on transit. It already is: as King et al. point out, transit receives about 20 percent of federal surface transportation funding while accounting for only 2 to 3 percent of U.S. passenger trips. And as Cox points out, two-thirds of the recent rise in transit commuting occurred in the six “transit legacy cities”–New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington. These six cities have the nation’s six largest concentrations of downtown office employment, and transit routes were designed to funnel people into and out of these concentrated areas. Transit use has languished in other areas with subways or much touted light railway systems like Portland‘s.

Those who complain about the condition of the nation’s highways need to remember that since the 1980’s, money has been taken from highway funding to pay for bike paths and other items that are not related to maintaining highways. The program with our highways is not lack of money–it is how the money is spent. The amount of spending on public transportation in relation to the percentage of the population that uses public transportation is another example of the government trying to force people to do something they are not interested in doing. That is not the government’s job.

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