A recent article by Oregon writer and radio talk-show host Jayne Carroll brings back some old memories. Carroll notes that, sometime in the 1970s, Alan Webber, an aide to then-city commissioner Neil Goldschmidt, wrote a memo titled, “Disincentives to the Automobile.”

In the early 1970s, I was a college student who had helped to found OSPIRG. In the summer of 1972, OSPIRG hired me and a dozen other summer interns, including Dick Benner and Bob Stacy (who later worked for 1000 Friends of Oregon), to work on various issues. Henry Richmond (who later founded 1000 Friends of Oregon) was OSPIRG’s staff attorney and Steve McCarthy was its executive director.

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Charles Krauthammer thinks he has the solution to high gas prices: increase gas taxes. If $4 a gallon gasoline gets a few more people to ride transit and buy more fuel-efficient cars, just think what $8 a gallon gasoline would do!

That’s a little bit like saying, “Oh, you got shot in the gut? Well, here is the solution for you: just shoot yourself in the head.”

Or think of it this way: suppose food prices were so high that some people were starving. I know! Let’s increase taxes to double the cost of food. That’ll teach ’em.

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Over the past 25 years, the population of the Pittsburgh urban area has remained fixed at about 1.8 million people. Driving, however, has increased by almost 50 percent.

During this period, Pittsburgh has spent hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading light-rail lines, building exclusive busways, and — in the latest project — building a $435 million transit tunnel under the Allegheny River. Despite (or because of) this investment, transit ridership has dropped by more than 25 percent.

Although the numbers vary slightly from place to place, Pittsburgh’s story is pretty typical of transit everywhere. Sure, some cities have seen ridership gains, but subsidies to transit are huge and transit does not make a notable (meaning 5 percent or more) contribution to personal mobility in any urban area except New York (where it is 10 percent).

Bill Steigerwald, an editor of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, surveys the failure of the transit industry through an interview with the Antiplanner’s friend, Wendell Cox. Cox’s comments are scathing.

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The Antiplanner was in Austin, Texas on Wednesday speaking to people about a revived proposal to build light rail. I showed that light rail requires far more land to produce the same amount of transportation as highways, that it emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than typical automobiles, and that most cities that have built it have ended up cutting transit service to low-income neighborhoods.

After my presentation, someone who was obviously not persuaded came up and said if we didn’t build light rail we would end up paving over Texas. I repeated that less than 3 percent of Texas is urbanized and 95 percent is rural open space.

“Anyone can lie with statistics,” he said. “I think you have an agenda.” I pointed out that my numbers came from the Census Bureau, but he just repeated, “You have an agenda.”

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