Or, debunking the verbal diarrhea spewing forth in Randal O’Toole’s column in the DC Examiner.

Ok, in fairness O’Toole perhaps doesn’t speak for all Libertarians - though as a Senior Fellow at CATO he is undeniably a representative thereof.  While I’ve at times described myself as a Libertarian, with strong sympathy for individual liberties and the unlimited potential of the free market, libertarians themselves are often irritatingly, belligerently ignorant and naive about the complexity of everyday economic decisions and government’s mandatory role in crafting the framework for those to occur.

Anyway.

KEY DATA: Americans spend 15 cents per passenger mile flying, 24 cents driving, and 80 cents on urban transit.

So? Using passenger-miles is deceptive - and so is comparing across travel modes for different trip purposes ( urban transit and air travel are hardly substitutes).  What matters in comparing the cost of travel is the cost per trip.  People make trips to satisfy a purpose:   To go to work, to go to the grocery store, to punch Randal O’Toole in the sternum, etc. People don’t make trips for the purposes of traveling the most miles possible.  We should ask, then, what is the average cost per trip to the grocery store?  By using passenger-miles as a metric, we bias the comparison to favor low-density sprawl with high-speed, long-distance trips.

Wait a second.  24 cents per passenger-mile driving doesn’t smell right.  The IRS rate for driving expense is now $0.55 per mile, meaning for O’Toole to be telling the truth average vehicle occupancy would have to be over 2 - preposterous.

In 1964, most of America’s transit systems were private and the industry as a whole was profitable.  Then Congress passed the Urban Mass Transit Act, not—as some believe—to help low-income people who couldn’t afford cars, but because railroads threatened to terminate money-losing commuter trains into Manhattan, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

Well, technically his first statement is partially true, he simply neglects to mention the THOUSANDS of transit operations that went out of business in the late 1940s and during the 1950s, before government aid.  Major cities, where transit was vital to continued business operations, had already long established public corporations to operate transit, such as the CRT in Chicago or the IND in New York.  Privately owned transit had been going bankrupt since the early 20th century.  So sure, maybe many privately-owned transit operations were profitable in 1964 - the few that were left.

The second sentence is also somewhat true - but he loads it up with negative connotations suggesting nefarious motives.  The continued operation of this country’s economy depends on people being able to get to work - all the more so in the main command-and-control centers of national business, such as New York, Chicago, etc.  One can have a thoughtful debate about whether the Federal government is the appropriate place to raise revenue and distribute subsidies, but we’re not on such a level with this guy.

Washington, Atlanta and San Francisco then spent billions of dollars building new subway and elevated rail transit lines. These systems completely failed to live up to their promises, costing far more and carrying fewer riders than projected, and they did little to relieve congestion.

He’s calling WMATA’s MetroRail a complete failure?  The second most heavily utilized heavy rail system in the country, with over a million rides a day?  Seriously?

Sure, BART was a boondoggle, but poor political decisions can hardly be taken to discredit the notion of publicly-subsidized transit construction.

the 2000 census revealed that the Washington, D.C. urban area had gained more than 100,000 new jobs since 1990 and that virtually all those commuters drove to work.

Moreover, more than 21,000 commuters who took transit to work in 1990 switched to driving by 2000. You won’t hear that from Washington Metro officials.

…so?  And yet, Metrorail’s ridership has dramatically increased since 1990, and I suspect a very large number of those new jobs were out in suburban hellholes like Tyson’s Corner where transit is a non-competitive mode choice.

To cover the high costs of rail transit, many transit agencies ended up cutting bus service, contributing to declines in per-capita transit ridership.

Whoa, a good point.  Yes, there are several cities that built pork-barrel light rail lines in totally unjustified locations, then had to reduce bus service to pay to operate the light rail.  Again, this doesn’t discredit the notion of publicly subsidizing transit.  It merely damns individual projects.

The Chicago Transit Authority is “on the verge of collapse” as it needs $16 billion to rehabilitate its tracks and trains.

The figure in every press release, FOR YEARS, has been that $5-$6 billion are needed to bring the entire CTA rail system to a state of good repair. But hey, as long as we’re making shit up, let’s just throw an extra 1 in there.

Rail advocates argue that all transportation is subsidized so we should pay no attention to the transit subsidies behind the curtain. Yet transit subsidies are vastly out of proportion to other transportation support and have made transit the most expensive way to travel in the U.S.

Straw man.  Transit should be subsidized because it provides several public benefits, including but not limited to: 1) benefits to drivers during congested travel periods, 2) allowing more efficient land use, 3) better air quality, 4) regional job/housing accessibility.  Clearly, there are several cross-subsidies going every which way - this is why transit funding usually ends up coming from broad-based taxes like the sales tax, with the idea that to some extent everyone will bear the tax burden.  At the federal level, transit funding largely is diverted from gasoline tax revenues - also a justifiable source, for the benefits drivers derive from other people riding transit.

While less than 4 percent of the cost of driving and less than 10 percent of the cost of flying is subsidized, three-fourths of the cost of transit comes from subsidies.

4 percent of the cost of driving?  Gasoline taxes only pay for around 60% of road construction.  And that’s just capital costs.  Who pays for emergency services, air quality mitigation, health care for people injured in accidents?  Oh yeah, society shares those burdens.

Lastly, I present two conclusive pieces of evidence in support of my case.  First:

Had enough?  Didn’t think so.

Would you listen to this guy?  Me neither.  QED.