Pedestrians, Cyclists, and Transit users pay a lot more than money for the motoring lifestyle of others. We have to suffer from health problems caused by living near or breathing near exhaust fumes on a regular basis (e.g. while riding our bikes on the roads). We have to walk *much* longer distances because of all of the space car infrastructure takes up. All of our destinations are spread much farther apart than makes sense for pedestrians especially. We have to face the dangers of walking across intersections and cycling near large lethal speeding metal machines on roads which were not set up with cyclists in mind. Transit users have to put up with the congestion and delays caused by far too many private automobiles trying to use the same pathways.

Accommodating the private automobiles in our cities simply does not make sense and is not in the best interest of the city’s residents. To me it’s plain as day that walking, biking, and taking transit are far more city-friendly modes of transport, and these should be prioritized far and away above private automobiles.

Also, using any measure of current ridership makes for a bad argument due to the half-century of heavy highway funding paired with spotty transit funding. If you owned both a Lamborghini and a 1986 Pinto Wagon, would you complain about the Pinto not being able to keep up?

But the transit “just” got $9 billion, which is implied to be less in comparison to the $30 billion in highways, is astoundingly disingenuous use of statistics.

I am not sure I trust these figures you cite – my wild guess is they loaded highways with a lot of soft costs and didn’t load transit with the same stuff, but I will accept the $30 and $9 billion figures for sake of argument.

In 2006, according to the DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics (Table 1-37), here were the passenger miles for highway vs. transit (in millions):

Highway: 4,933,689
Transit: 52,154

This means, if your figures are correct, there is a $0.006 per passenger mile subsidy for driving and a $0.173 per passenger mile subsidy for transit. This means the transit subsidy is 28.8 times larger than the driving subsidy.

As I said, I am fine with setting gas taxes to push the driving subsidy to zero, but lets not pretend that transit isn’t massively more subsidized than driving.

With the stimulus package, the tax free limit on transit has been raised to $230.

http://holierthanyou.blogspot.com/2009/02/stimulus-bill-nearly-doubles-pre-tax.html