 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Peter Van Doran Senior fellow at the Cato Institute and editor of regulation magazine. Welcome back to Free Thoughts, Peter. Thanks again for having me Now hold in my hand hot off the press is an onion article from 2000 of which the title is hot off the press. Yes, it's off the printing that printer at least in the title is 98% of US commuters favor public transportation for others What does that say about public transportation politics? Well, oddly enough, um, well, maybe not oddly the onion, right finds the truth and then tells it to us in a satirical way and in this particular case, uh, they're actually quite right Um, I'll I'll shift ahead to some data. Um, so there's surveys every year of of Uh the habits the transportation habits of us citizens or us residents in the trump era I don't know whether they're citizens or residents, but anyway, there's a department of transportation survey and they ask people Um, how do you get to work? And I have in 1989 Drive self, right? Then there's ride with others, which I didn't include but drive self With 76.3% in 1989 2016 guess what? 76.2% no 76.3. Oh, wow. That's that's pretty amazing. It's exactly the same so What is all the money we spend on transit do it allows Most people to still drive themselves to work now. When did you first get involved with public transportation policy? 41 years ago I was I had so I graduated from MIT in 1977 and The summer of 1977 I spent as a research assistant for a professor named Alan Altshuler And he had a contract with the department of transportation to write a classic mit consulting report Uh on the urban transportation system. They wanted a big think big piece to talk about Um transit and cars and the environment and cars versus transit and energy and Congestion and all of those things rolled into one He submitted the report to the well. I My task was to read Everything out there on energy And one reason I did energy in my phd program later was because I started out in 1977 reading a lot of books on energy And I said this is interesting But this experience with Alan Altshuler also also got me interested in urban transportation and In my scholarly career before kato. I taught courses on urban policy analysis for 20 years and a component of that class was always a transportation component and It got started with this summer research experience in 1977 So one of the interesting things you notice when you look at articles about public transit or calls for more public transit is Public transit can mean a whole lot of things right. I mean I mean any vehicle you can hop on that's not yours and it'll take you where you want to go is public transit um if it's run by the state but When we see, you know, we need to spend we need to ramp up money We need to put more infrastructure in they don't mean things like buses They never mean things like buses. They mean things like light rail light rail trains Things that you I mean first have the the effect that you have to figure out exactly where they're going to go And then they're going to go in exactly that spot forever and ever till the end of time Unless you want to dig another tunnel under washington d.c. Or whatever And and buses buses not only get kind of excluded, but buses are like looked down upon It's you know, that's they're the cheap seats. We wouldn't want more buses What's going on there? Like why why do we seem so fixated on On trains on things with obviously much higher infrastructure costs and so on well Two things one in this book or well, let me continue the d.o.t. Consulting project That alan el shuler and his team Wrote and then submitted to the d.o.t Was so down on transit Subsidies and expenditures that and in this book the call was if you're going to do something What makes sense is buses buses are flexible buses are cheap Light rail heavy rail are capital intensive very costly to to build and to maintain and Not very flexible once the route is is there you can't it's hard to move train tracks and So even way back then the the intellectual position was that If anything makes sense and in denser settings to get people out of cars It's to do something to aid buses i.e. dedicated lanes where they don't have stop lights or they have stop lights that are sequenced and They get to where people want to go faster and they're flexible and they can be rerouted So a what you talk about is old and and all transportation scholars have called for such options a long time ago, but b the politics and the social reality of transit is that Middle-class people who pay taxes think of buses as something for poor people And no one wants to talk about that I'll give you even where I live Montgomery County, Maryland Which I affectionately call the People's Republic of Montgomery County. It's very very liberal And it's known nationwide as being a transit leader in a Where urban planning density is required all of those all of those things in the Liberal land use playbook are epitomized by Montgomery County and yet in my own county This is an article from 2009 in the washington post Council Montgomery County council also picks light rail over buses for transitway project So this is the corridor city's transitway. This is up county where I live to link Upper upper county with denser parts of middle county Closer to DC parts. Yes Light rail for the corridor city's transitway on a route that would begin at shitty grove swing west to the proposed science city North to the commsat building near Clarksburg would cost about 900 million to build About twice that of a bus rapid transit line. Okay, so and the county council staff A recommended to the council that they have a bus plan rather than light rail Now i'm reading you a quote from michael nap d up county i.e. He was My representative on the county council at the time This is a quote. Montgomery county, maryland I've not had a lot of conversation with folks who want to get on a bus No matter what you call it whether it is a pretty bus or not Said council member michael nap who represents much of the area the transitway would serve He said his constituents expect light rail So I mean, there you go So it was the conclusion of the study which was done for dot buses Yay buses all the way or maybe buses Oh, totally but but i mean i mean that buses should be subsidized a lot or But or just if you're going to do it you should do buses if you're i'd have to go back and check the exact language I mean the the sort of libertarian Concerns That we're now discussing and animate our discussion certainly weren't part of my world Back in 1977 nor in alan alan ultra lose world probably ever so I Rather than misquote what the book does or doesn't talk for is just that my memory is that we adamantly said You know heavy rail is very expensive make make sense maybe only in manhattan and that's and that's If it makes sense somewhere it would be the new york city context in everywhere else buses because they're flexible they can change they can you can adapt to whatever reality happens and Then the problem is their buses and middle class people they i mean my own view is They go to europe they see the trams in amsterdam and they come back and they say and they read the new yorker Like I do and they say We got to have trams and look like amsterdam. I mean to to be honest. I think it might be Simple as that and it's very class related i.e. The help rides the bus We don't I wonder if that's now exacerbated by the changing cultural place of cars in america because there was so there was a time when You know everyone you aspired to have a car a car was a symbol of freedom A car was the kind of quintessential american object after maybe a baseball but That has changed quite a lot. So younger people You know are less likely to drive or have less interest in driving And and the car is the car is kind of now seen as this thing We have to figure out how to get rid of because it's the source of global warming of congestion of traffic Noise of fatalities of whatever else and so a bus a bus is simply a bigger car, right? So even if a bus doesn't Doesn't have some of these same problems even if it's better than trains in all sorts of ways It still is kind of admitting defeat and in the crusade against the automobile tooth one there certainly has been a discussion in the literature of whether Auto behavior and autos in u.s culture have changed there was a Decrease for the first time ever there was a decrease in vehicle miles traveled after the great recession and urbanists and pro or pro transit and anti car people and environmentalists and young and there was this proclamation that The u.s has changed and we've gotten over the hump and we're now going towards amsterdam Everyone's going to have bikes and trams and blah blah blah Trying to disentangle the great recession from actual changes in goals, which Would if people's incomes got back? So subsequently the vmt has come back and as I gave you new data The transit share has not changed. Uh, well, it's gone up a little but driving self has is remarkably constant over time The breakdown by age is is not available in the transportation statistics. So drive. I don't think I could be wrong, but I don't know of data where Driving self by age is is available. It may be but I'm I'm not aware of that so the anecdotally, uh, I have a nephew who Uh, it lives in seattle and quote was reluctant to own a car. He didn't care about it. And I said, what do you mean, you know? so I guess We all may have younger nieces and nephews in which the alleged change Exists, but in the aggregate data about the u.s as a whole it still seems very auto-based and Um, I don't have enough information to know whether this youth trend is or is not Was recession induced or whether it's actually Going to sustain itself as they enter middle age. I'll just as it's a further anecdotal data. So my my father worked for 35 years in the auto industry as a for general motors and retired a few years ago and and towards the end of his career when we would talk about The state of this stuff one of the things he mentioned is that All of the the auto industries one of the the big problems that they had was figuring out how to market To young people because they were all concerned and whether this was born out in the numbers or just kind of a gut feeling That this was the direction they would go that young people were not interested in buying new cars Anymore what that if they if they got a car they they were perfectly happy to buy This was more just like a commodity, you know, I it's not not cool anymore. I could buy a used car I don't really care about, you know, the kind of American graffiti lifestyle was gone And so they were trying to figure out how to I mean basically how to market like New general motors cars to millennials and were very worried about this I think that I saw a stat I'm pretty sure this is correct that and I think in the last 15 years So 15 years ago 90 percent of people over 16 or over driving age Had a driver's license and now it's 75 percent of people And I know a fair amount of people who do not have driver's licenses who are in the early 20s, for example Now we live in an urban world There's a certain dc new york flavor to this conversation and if we were in phoenix, I I don't I really I mean, I think it's um It's it's possible in certain in in seattle in san francisco dc In new york and boston it's certainly possible to live and not have a car I mean even back when I didn't have a car till I was 30 31 something like that because I was an academia and lived in college towns and you can wander around by bike or you know, whatever, but Outside of those locales it's I suspect that what we're talking about is is not true. I also wonder about the So you said that the you know the kind of number of miles driven per person has not decreased Right the number of people driving the number of people driving or the number alone to commute Yeah, the percentage I think you'd mentioned something else about like total number of passenger passenger miles That's an I didn't mention that data. Okay, but so I could I wonder if there's also that That the people who I mean, I know that this is the case for me like when I first came to dc My family has a car, but I never drive My kids are actually always Astonished when I do drive and they'll tell their mom like if I drive them somewhere like when mom gets home They'll tell their mom that dad drove them and they always say it in this way that like and can you believe we're not dead? Sort of way but but so I didn't drive much at all and so I took a lot of public transit But then over the last five six years I personally don't drive but my uber driver does a lot And that still is counting as and so I wonder how much of public transit Time has shifted in these urban areas and especially in dc new york san francisco Back to cars but in the form of ride sharing I Did not I can look it's hard to say I'm not prepared I can look up the data Actually, we could we could supplement it put it up on the on the website associate with the broadcast I am But I think it's important that that puts it in a context of Alternate ways of commuting alternate things to do that have come up to Into existence uber the scooters that are everywhere in dc that that metro wider ship has the metro wider ship has been going down you have the numbers for dc, I think on How many people commute via car versus metro even in dc again that the Transit use is very very associated Not with actually total population density, but with downtown employment transit is good at getting people from dispersed Areas to one central place If that's not the design of the urban area, then it's a very little use So dc is a large employer. It's called the federal government And a lot of those jobs are downtown And yet in dc you'd think I mean just off that I'll ask you guys What do you think the percent of commuters in the washington dc area, right? That's the whole metro area that use transit what percent of work commutation occurs by transit 20 27 percent 50 percent It's 14 That's astounding. It's only 14. It's just it's How does that how much does that shift so we like The dc metro area is very large And and it gets it kind of gets more spread out on the periphery and the jobs get more spread out So if you took just you know the area around like downtown obviously, right as you get further and further in The percentage of commuters that are transit increases and as you get further and further out it decreases Um If such data, you know, and you are going to ask me inside the bellway inside the city limits I don't know The but I've always been stunned by Um again, it's the concentration of downtown employment, which is very high in dc relative to other other cities and yet Just listen to wtop every day and listen to traffic. Um, it's Despite the 700 000 people a day who use metro Of that is a small percentage of the five million people In dc a lot of whom commute from lots of places to downtown Um by car. I like to get stepped back. So going back to your your study when you're a grad student It was for the department of transportation But you they refused the report by the way, they wouldn't accept it It was so contra because it went against everything they wanted to do Um, so it ended up being published as an mit press book in 1979. Well, it was this radical libertarian position, correct? Well, not me. It was just It was it may seem that way to us now, but at the time Um, and certainly my whole career, um in in this area There's been a distinct difference between what transit and transportation intellectuals Say when they appraise the system regardless of their political affiliations In that brookings and kato and aii and all I mean Alan al-chuler very straightforward straight ahead Classic bureaucracy political scientist public administration sort of person who taught at mit and then the kennedy school at harvard Not flaming libertarian enclaves of by any means That the transportation intellectual consensus over time Was that transportation subsidies for transit probably made little sense and yet Transit actual transit transportation behavior over time by the political system And which is responding to constituents has been totally the opposite. I mean I You can rank order policy areas as to how large the differences between what intellectuals think about What policy should be in an area and what policy is My number one area for discrepancy is agriculture policy where The overwhelming elite consensus is that agriculture subsidies are totally totally unnecessary particularly now that we have Markets futures markets for everything farmers grow and thus they can hedge and and do whatever they want to ensure themselves against price swings The second area in my second worst Compliance between what or difference between what intellectuals think and what policy really is maybe urban transportation in which Light rail and heavy rail and transportation subsidies are politically desirable and favored by constituents as I described in the quote about Montgomery county and the Consensus I mean cliff winston and brookings wrote a book 20 years ago that called for the end that US consumer welfare would be enhanced if mass transit subsidies were Go to zero and We became a much more auto-based system and then transit would endogenously arise and be priced at whatever it took To relieve congestion, which is what it might be very useful for that, but um In the absence of congestion pricing on the roads that you also Wouldn't get that. Um, so quite frankly what intellectuals call for is zero transportation subsidies, but congestion pricing and better pricing on better pricing on On roads and which would reduce their use at peak time, which would in turn Change where and why people live where they do and change their work patterns, etc. Etc. So we're back to econ 101, which is we need good prices For stuff rather than subsidies for certain things that are seen as good Because the other thing that isn't subsidized is somehow evil You said that transit really only Works when you have a Area of dense jobs and people going into and then out of that area and And so we're talking, you know dense urban centers And then it doesn't work well in any other situation like, you know, people moving around in the suburbs or phoenix So my question then is does Political support for transit track that so do people who live In the suburbs or live in phoenix? And the politicians who represent them are they less keen on transit than The people who live in these urban centers or imagine that they do I'll I'll give you I'll give you an answer to that question that may not directly address what what you say which is Originally mass transit subsidies at the federal level They all went or half of them It all went to new york city in chicago that so 1970 urban mass transit administration So-called umpta grants all it was new york city in chicago Well, that's not an equilibrium in congress It's you've got it. I mean so what's happened over time is transit subsidies now go everywhere And so my little the city near where I grew up in northern new york watertown new york 25 000 people Uh now has a bus system And the buses go around from nowhere to nowhere and no one's on them. And so over time if you look at the Productivity of transit employees. So you look passenger miles per transit employee in the united states It's just a steep curve linearly going down The reason is at the margin What mass transit subsidies have done is expanded mass transit to less and less dense settings i.e. watertown and phoenix because politically if you're going to have a federal subsidy system It can't just go to where it might be economically efficient. It has to go Everywhere or it's where it's politically efficient. And so Martin walks who teaches urban planning at usc. He's now emeritus I used to use an article in my class written by him in science magazine That said it just documented all these trends i'm talking about which is transit expansion went after middle-class voters in the suburbs to gain political support and that meant In effect declining productivity and increasing inefficiency because transit was going In settings where it wasn't Very useful because those places were automobile based and Could be easily and thus buses Kind of run around empty without anybody in them using diesel fuel and And capital expenditures Okay, but then so someone who is a fan of transit in the on rails sense of it might say That all sounds great. And yeah, like Setting up new light rail tracks might not be the most economically efficient thing and adding more buses might be more efficient or you know Expanding driving but having congestion pricing and so on might be more economically efficient But cars are cars and buses. They're burning the buses are burning that diesel fuel. They're all contributing to global warming The environment matters and rail even if it looks inefficient on paper is zero emission It's it's so it's better. It's better for from an environmental standpoint, which Is a I guess a longer term perspective. Well, we're looking ahead It actually depends on the source how the electricity is generated So until recently This mid-atlantic region the dirty little secret is new we had much cheaper power prices than new england and new york and Maryland and virginia and and dco is touted You know, we're in the northeast and it's allegedly anti-business all that but Long island electricity prices are outrageous 15 cents a kilowatt hour 17 cents a kilowatt hour And maryland is eight. We know why we had coal proximity half Half of until recently just the past few years. Do you mean coal is closer to maryland or just a used coal? Half of electricity in the pepco Electricity system I know because twice a year the electricity bill has to send out an emissions report to every customer and so You all threw them away. I read them This is why peter's our favorite guest Uh, it's oh, I've always was amazed that in this liberal right in maryland and dc liberal liberal liberal etc Half the electricity comes from coal fired power plants And so electricity was cheap here because we burned coal So when you went on the metro you were and used electricity you were burning coal That doesn't even include the energy when you when they built it which also can be a lot of fossil fuel If you're running earth movers around that are running on diesel fuel and shipping in rails and all that stuff in the book I talked about earlier the allen alcher urban transportation system book. Um, there were calculations done in the book about Whether the construction of bart in san francisco the barrier rapid transit system The energy used to construct bart if you assume that it actually saves energy operating relative to cars and makes some assumptions and How how full the cars were and how empty passing, you know, if you rig it You still came out with it would take it might never ever recover the energy used to build bart because it's underground It's it's very expensive and energy intensive to bore tunnels um, but but it's also i mean it'll also be expensive to You know you want to get okay. We want to let people drive into dc To it instead of the routes that they're taking on the metro. You're gonna have to There's no highways that run through dc putting a highway through is going to Kick up a lot of stuff into the atmosphere as well. So how does it compare to building roads uh Again the book I didn't read that part of the book. Uh, it's been 41 years. Yeah. Come on. Peter Recall out the top of your head. I don't not that I would be surprised I don't want to misstate what the the book had a long discussion about total life cycle costs of transit versus highways and things like that and and So I think there are answers to your questions out there And again, I'd have to go dig a lot more to to to figure out Well, it would have to be if you're not digging tunnels into the earth I mean, maybe if you build the the big dig in boston cost about as much as that was as a as a metro line But most highways you just that was a big deal on top. That was a huge the boston thing was a big Never would have happened without federal subsidies And those wouldn't have happened without tip o'neill being speaker of the house So I mean it that's the tip o'neill Subsidy to boston was the big dig. I forget how many billion dollars I can't even remember in how much longer and how many overruns but this is a good segue to go in to Talk about highways in the city and all this stuff going back We had discussed earlier before we went on air about the evolution of these transit subsidies How they came about and you pointed out nixon to some degree, but I think people again, particularly for our younger listeners The reason that transit has no intellectuals or transit subsidies have very little intellectual support But but great political support has to do with the sixties and the riots and nixon and I'll read you a quote from the book And I'd forgotten this quote This is a page. Oh, I don't have the page 36 of the allen all chiller book So all chiller's explanation of why in his estimation even though transit makes no sense from an economic point of view Why is it so popular? And the answer was his follows whether one's concern was the economic vitality of cities protecting the environment Stopping highways energy conservation assisting the elderly and handicapped and the poor or as the onion article said Simply and i'm inserting that that wasn't in this book or simply getting people off the road. So I can drive faster Transit was a policy that would be embraced That is it wasn't that transit was actually an effective way of serving any of those objectives It's simply that everyone believed that it would be so And that's politics, right? So transit Was the republican answer for what to do about cities that were burning without bringing up race and Particularly since highways the urban interstates were the last to be completed in the system And they were expensive and they were always Associated with slum removal and black neighborhoods resisted. They said why why are you knocking down cheap housing for us when This road is going to serve white commuters who aren't don't even live here So in boston and in dc. So, you know the um, is it 395? Right that that stops Right down here from cato. That was supposed to be i-95 through dc Oh cut right through the middle of the city right through right and then there were protests and so they stopped In boston if you take 95 from the toben bridge down and you have that big left hand turn In the middle of the air and you go next to boston garden if you look to your right There's this exit that goes off into the air and then stops And again people don't realize there was going to be an interstate between mit and harvard right through central cambridge Going by right by the bu bridge Right by fenway park and then through rocksbury and then hooking up with 93 95 south of in in in the south end of boston there were protests there were And the governor of massachusetts at the time was an mit graduate And alan all chuler was the secretary of transportation for massachusetts and so alan all chuler invented the solution Which was the urban interstate highway trade in Which is if a governor asserted that we needed to to to Not build these highways that were part of the interstate system We could convert that money into mass transit projects and all chuler says This was a decentralized conflict congress could Reassemble the coalition that was for transportation that the anti highway protests would stop because if you didn't want it You could get your subsidy and do something else with it And the rest is history. I mean it was a so mass transit spending grew the most under president nixon it it was a Political solution to a series of conflicts that makes no intellectual sense, but it makes perfect political sense and it got It it got rid of all the conflict from a congressional point of view and put it back at the state level Which is what they wanted. So how did this look? I mean the new york city subway and i and the boston subway I don't think the dc subway, but they the new york city and boston predate these subsidies these federal ones, correct? But expansion right so the boston system right the red line of all these so the dc expansion So believe it or not the red line that i ride Do you ever wonder in dc? Why? The other line stopped short Of the beltway mostly and then the red line goes so much further out maryland traded in Interstate highway money and made the red line a lot longer And and it fits with the politics of maryland The reason the orange line historically stopped at the beltway And and both ends right is that money was used by maryland for the red line to extend it And again in interstate highway So feds like to spend money It's popular But this spending money in this way and certain constituencies led to hassles for those constituencies So they said to the constituencies you can use your you can use the money For other stuff, but new york city is private right the subway that's what i meant, but at one point sort of Initially yes, but even after but by 1913 they were built with city capital money But then operated and owned privately So it's a hybrid a hybrid model Total conversion to the sort of mta running everything is is post world war two Boston the system went bankrupt in 1905 So a privately created like hybrid system private. Well, that was really private and that went bankrupt early There's in in both new york city and boston the subway systems were very much The proponents were real estate developers in the outer boroughs Queens and brooklyn were developed because subways allowed people to get there and get to work in Manhattan quickly and real estate interests didn't want the fares to be high They wanted the fares to be low that so so that people settled And then once settlement occurred then you could sort of have bankruptcy or subsidies because once you've got people using it It's then unthinkable to sort of shut it off And you and I have had conversations about how With certain public services. There's this long run game in which Did it get enough interested parties Involved in it and we get a very uncado-like Equilibrium where lots of people have a vested interest in being subsidized And even though it looked private to start with it really wasn't sustainable Um given what they were charging for the service How do we address this then I mean and this this is a question isn't limited just to transit but transit now as you've described it seems to encapsulate all of these problems, which is you've got a Policy or a service or subsidies or whatever else that that comes in Not because people who know about this stuff think it's a good idea, but for purely political reasons Um that It then becomes popular because constituencies love Subsidies or services or whatever else It it then in the case of transit becomes Culturally embedded so that people come to see Not just like a moral case for light rail in terms of the you know, we're gonna have environment environmental effects, but also Uh There's there's like a status thing that your your city is on the map if it has light rail And and the politicians then you get the cycle of now the politicians have to double down because it's a great way to fire up Um, and so we're we're spending all of this money. We've got this kind of obvious solution that is more effective cheaper Potentially and more environmentally friendly Could service all of these people better Um Namely buses and they could be electric buses if we didn't want we wanted to get rid of emissions but There's you've got that you've got the constituency of get there from here So you've got you've got all of these people now and and cultural attitudes and for your property owners I mean anyone who has a property on a metro line How much of their property value is related to that all the businesses that are related to the stakeholders here get Yeah, and so now we so how do you get out of this? Is there any way to is this or do we just kind of say well Do we just have to give up? You can say yes, it's okay. I think we do you you have just stated extremely eloquently All the properties that of what an economist used to describe an equilibrium i.e. There are enormous forces That have got us to where we are it started out as an accident You have a republican president in the 60s and the cities are blowing up and he's and the highway coalition's fallen apart And he and his supporters have to figure out what in the heck are we going to do his answer? subsidized transit and it has worked like crazy in ways that appalled Classic republicans probably uh unless they want to be reelected And you so how do we so getting from where we are now To the world that the brookings scholars have described as optimal that the kato's scholars have described as optimal, etc. etc, etc Extraordinarily difficult and I don't know I mean that the so the intellectual in me agrees with you a hundred percent and I I There are no easy ways to get from what you describe to where we need to go And in the end, um, it's usually budget crises budget constraints and eventually Somebody somewhere is going to not want to pay the taxes that make this thing hum But the same thing was true with ag right ag So you could say the same thing about agriculture subsidies And guess what ag did I mean we had reform and ag And then it all went away and now it's gotten even worse because instead of explicit Crop subsidies we now have subsidized crop insurance Well, that sounds much better to vote. I mean who's against insurance Yes, it's just ag subsidies dressed up in new clothing. So If you want to be very very very glum about things think ag and maybe transit um and uh So no, do I have any great answers about how to get out of this and the answer is um I'll give you even a bigger puzzle The silver line in dc Do you know what's paying for it? So this is a new expansion of metro for those of you. Sorry. Yeah, those americans for some reason live outside the belt I'm gonna say I'm gonna say Airport taxes maybe well, there's some federal subsidies, but you know a lot of what's paying for this silver line Excess toll diversion from the dullis greenway Which is a private road. So we have a kato approved road And it goes from dullis to leesburg It's a private concession But it's governed by virginia. And so what virginia has done is there's now a surtax on the tolls On the dullis greenway that's going to go up and up and up and up In the future And i've been betting with myself one of the motorists on this road Going to understand that their tolls are not even though it's private Are not just paying for the debt service on this road The all the toll increases that they're incurring now Are going to subsidize the construction of the silver line And you think some loudon county officials would say enough just stop just we've had enough right kind of a a network I've For those that's an old movie where some guys out the window mad as hell and i'm not going to take it anymore. Yes, and Well, so eventually The cross subsidy game that keeps all of this going which is an randio tool Our own scholar has talked about The gas the diversion of gasoline taxes from Roads to transit and bikeways and every other thing under under god's green earth, right Do motorists understand that they're not only being taxed for the roads, but the taxes are being diverted to things they don't use if motorists Understand that and i thought this loudon county thing would blow up so far i've been wrong right the post reports Taxes or the tolls are going up because it's paying for the silver line and like crickets. I don't I don't hear any Motor at triple a saying this is outrageous or something. No, so but eventually I think Things like that which is gas tax diversion What about we'll we'll eventually get the because the majority of people drive cars right even in in dc What about reliability that's that the reliability of the metro system because it's just look what's happened in the last year The the what did the metro chief do he played a big game of chicken with with maryland and virginia and dc over what Not we need more fit not to make the users pay more instead. It was You know, it's a shame that this that maryland virginian dc are ponying up And a dead weight we needed a dedicated source of public revenue because all other transit systems have it dc's the only one That's not that's our problem. We don't have a dedicated source of revenue The republican governor of maryland sort of reading the tea leaves kind of held up for a while But then he realized you know where all the voters are They're not out in the eastern shore Uh Where the chickens are grown there in montgomery county and you know what? They like their metro and they want the purple line So he caved and let the purple line go through even though it's 1.4 billion dollars And it's going from nowhere to nowhere and it took away a bike lane from all the people in chevy chase that love the old railroad path that was their little recreational trail but he still did it because um They're good at reading what wins elections and my sense is this is going to go on until I think it's diversion of the gas stuff will eventually Um People will say I thought I was paying for the roads and well you sort of are but we're taking a third of it And we're using it for things you don't believe in or use and So is there an ultimate lesson here? This is we might have said some I weird things to people listening today where you know say oh public transportation is an important thing It's so great. I love it. How would people get from South brooklyn to manhattan or how would people get from Arlington to dc or how would people get from roxbury to downtown boston or anywhere else? um What is the lesson that you generally should take away from The how how these public transportation Transpiration as it arose and then or how about a meta a meta palette I mean we could go above this was what unites ag and transit and all of this stuff And the answer is politics is a combination of belief systems that justify things combined with Diffuse taxes on a lot of people redistributed to a much smaller set of people in a concentrated way So the gas tax diversion is on a majority of transportation people are auto users and they don't know there's diversion and the gas taxes They don't may not even realize What they are and all that because they're embedded in the price so Small taxes on a lot of people diverted to purposes that also have philosophical or normative intense support I who could be against transit or against farmers or whatever That's a bullet. That's paul. That's a winning coalition and that's very sustainable over time Until either the philosophy goes away and those people are now Apparent for whatever reason and I don't know how that that's what sociologists and historians figure out How do you go from being in to being stigmatized and then to um, eventually the the tax The the the group of people that are tax somehow wake up and realize it and there's some incident or something that That causes a crisis in in this in the political support of those taxpayers Thanks for listening free thoughts is produced by test terrible If you enjoy free thoughts, please rate and review us on itunes to learn more visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org