A Free-Market Approach To Transit

"Broadsides against transit issued by researcher-publicists like Wendell Cox, Randal O'Toole, Peter Gordon, and Sam Staley set the tone of conservative thinking. These writers present themselves as free-market fundamentalists. The American transportation system, they argue, is a success, its domination by the automobile a reflection of consumers' preference for driving their own cars. But when you scratch below the surface, their devotion to the sovereign consumer and the efficient market is a pose; concealed beneath the rhetoric is a defense of ever-increasing subsidies to the highway lobby."

"Decades of highly subsidized automobile use have introduced vast economic distortions in American transportation and land use. They impose an increasing price in economic inefficiency, environmental damage, and loss of livable communities. But the misguided policies of the past have been built into the landscape, and they will not be easily undone.

Escape from traffic gridlock requires a shift toward price mechanisms in transportation; but the transition can only occur at a measured pace. It took more than half a century to build our present sprawl, and it will take decades to replace it with something better."