The Salt Lake County Council of Governments recently agreed to spend $2.5 billion on rail transit. But a state auditor found that the analysis used to justify the decision contained some errors that, if corrected, would have indicated the money should be spent on roads instead.

The analysis ranked commuter rail as the second-highest priority transportation investment for the county. But when the errors were corrected, it dropped to 19th out of 34.

“So what?” say city and county leaders. They would have spent the money on rail no matter what the analysis found.

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Last month, the Congressional Research Service put out two reports on federal transit funding. These reports offer some intriguing alternatives for transit for the next round of federal transportation reauthorization, which is due in 2009.

The first report (above), issued in September, deals a little more with transit history and structure. The almost-identically titled second report (below) came out about two weeks later and deals a little more with transit finance. But the two reports overlap in many ways, including their recommendations.

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Let’s face it: urban planners hate automobiles. They probably don’t hate their own car — many of them drive as much as anyone else. But they believe that Americans drive too much.

Their solution is to increase traffic congestion. But the question has always been, how do they sell that idea to a public that relies on cars for more than 80 percent of their travel? The answer is to come up with some fluffy phrase that sounds nice.

Traffic calming is one such term. Who could object to calm? Originally, traffic calming was applied to neighborhood streets. Then cities like Portland proposed to do arterial traffic calming. This meant converting, say, a four-lane street into a two- or three-lane street with bike lanes and wider sidewalks.

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