Campaign of Sabotage: Big Government's War Against Public Transportation

Abstract

Historically, American politicians have been far more generous to highways than to public transit. The political elite's failure to support public transit is based on the view that despite decades of state and federal support, transit ridership has dwindled. This article criticizes that theory, by explaining that far from promoting public transit, government at all levels has sabotaged transit in a variety of ways: by building highways to suburbs unserved by public transit, by loading down transit systems with unfunded mandates, by using housing, education and tax policy to encourage migration to those suburbs, and by using zoning policy to make suburbs as auto-dependent as possible.