Col. J. Envtl. L. article on how govt. sabotages transit
26 Colum. J. Envtl. L. 259


Columbia Journal of Environmental Law
2001


Article


*259 CAMPAIGN OF SABOTAGE: BIG GOVERNMENT'S WAR AGAINST PUBLIC
TRANSPORTATION


Michael Lewyn [FNa1]


Copyright ? 2001 Columbia Journal of Environmental Law; Michael Lewyn


I. Public Transit: Pros and Cons ....................................... 261
A. The Benefits of Transit ........................................ 261
B. The Inadequacy of Transit ...................................... 263
C. The Anti-Transit Story ......................................... 266
II. How Government Has Sabotaged Public Transit ......................... 267
A. Highway Policy ................................................. 267
1. How Government Put Highways In The Driver's Seat ............. 267
2. Highway Spending and Transit: Recipe for Reduced Ridership ... 270
a. First, Use Highways To Create Suburbs . . .................. 270
b. . . . Then Keep Transit Out Of The Suburbs ................. 273
B. Unfunded Mandates: How Big Brother Makes Transit Unaffordable .. 275
1. The Americans with Disabilities Act .......................... 275
2. Labor Laws that Limit Transit Operators' Ability to Reduce
Labor Costs ....................................................... 276
3. Limitations upon Transit Systems' Use of Parts Manufactured
in Foreign Countries .............................................. 277
4. Limitations on Charter and School Bus Service in Competition
with the Private Sector ........................................... 277
C. Other Anti-Transit Policies: Or, How To Attack Transit By
Attacking Cities .................................................. 278
1. Federal Housing Administration Mortgage Insurance ............ 278
2. Public Housing Policies that have Concentrated Poverty and
Crime in Cities ................................................... 279
3. Prestigious Schools for Suburbs and "Bad" Schools for Cities . 281
4. A Tax Code that Favors Driving and Suburban Life ............. 282
D. How Zoning Makes Suburbs Auto-Dependent ........................ 284
III. Does It Matter? ..................................................... 285
IV. Conclusion .......................................................... 287



*260 Introduction
Public transportation [FN1] helps the carless poor and disabled reach jobs and other opportunities, while reducing traffic congestion and air pollution by keeping cars off the road. Nevertheless, public transit has had limited political support in recent decades. Politicians and bureaucrats have used highways to create auto-oriented suburbs, while often failing to provide public transit to those suburbs. As a result, transit users are second-class citizens in most of America, and many Americans are compelled to pollute the air and congest the highways merely to work, shop, and play.
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 and will inevitably continue to dwindle because of Americans' love of their automobiles--a claim that in turn is based on the assumption that government has in fact sought to promote public transit. This article criticizes that assumption, and explains 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.


I. Public Transit: Pros and Cons

A. The Benefits of Transit
Public transportation benefits the public in at least four significant ways. First, public transit gives mobility to the millions of Americans who do not or cannot drive, including 24 million disabled Americans, [FN2] *261 5.4 million senior citizens, [FN3] and ninety four percent of welfare recipients. [FN4] By transporting the poor and the disabled to jobs and other opportunities, America's buses and trains help America meet a variety of social goals, including the Americans with Disabilities Act's goal of "welcom[ing] individuals with disabilities fully into the mainstream of American society" [FN5] and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act's [FN6] goals of "end[ing] the dependence of needy families on government benefits by promoting job preparation [and] work." [FN7]
Second, public transportation reduces air pollution. For example, buses emit only 1.54 grams of nitrogen oxide per passenger-mile (as opposed to 2.06 for single-person autos), 3.05 grams of carbon monoxide per passenger-mile (as opposed to 15.06 for single-person autos) and 0.2 grams of hydrocarbons per passenger-mile (as opposed to 2.09 for single-person autos). [FN8] Buses are likely to become even cleaner over the next decade or two. [FN9] As a result of federal programs and political *262 pressure, cities throughout America are purchasing buses using fuels that pollute less than do diesel buses. [FN10] A 1996 Federal Transit Administration study reports that if transit users drove cars everywhere, America's air would be afflicted with more than 126 million additional pounds of hydrocarbons and 156 million additional pounds of nitrogen oxide. [FN11]
Third, public transit reduces traffic congestion, because every person who is capable of driving but nevertheless chooses to ride public transit takes one automobile (his or her own) off the road. It follows that if public transit didn't exist, some cities would face startling increases in traffic congestion. For example, one study suggests that if New York City and its suburbs eliminated their public transit systems, the number of cars on the road would increase by 47.2% (or 1.9 million more cars). [FN12] Even more auto-dependent regions obtain some benefit due to public transit: for example, Los Angeles would have 6.2% more traffic without transit. [FN13]
Fourth, public transportation makes all Americans, even drivers, freer by giving them more flexibility: just as owning a car gives a driver the flexibility to go more places, owning a car and living near bus routes and train stops gives that driver the flexibility to go even more places in more ways.

*263 B. The Inadequacy of Transit
Despite the benefits of public transit, transit-dependent persons are second-class citizens in much of America. [FN14] A survey by the U.S. Commerce Department shows that only 54.4% of American households have any public transit at all available to them, and that only 28.8% claim to have satisfactory public transit. [FN15] Even in metropolitan areas with extensive transit systems, the majority of entry-level jobs are not transit-accessible. [FN16] For example, more than one-third of all entry-level jobs in the Baltimore region cannot be reached at all without an automobile, [FN17] the majority of entry-level jobs in metro Atlanta are not within a quarter mile of public transportation, [FN18] and residents of low-income neighborhoods in Cleveland could access less than half of metro *264 area jobs even with an eighty minute commute. [FN19] In smaller cities, a non-driver's life is more desperate still. For example, in Macon, Georgia (a city of 114,000 people), [FN20] sixteen percent of city households [FN21] (and fourteen percent of households in the county that includes Macon) [FN22] lack cars, yet city buses only operate until 6:45 PM in the evening on weekdays, Saturday service is limited, and no service is available on Sundays or holidays. [FN23] Because many entry-level employers require their newest employees to work evening and weekend shifts, Macon's bus schedule virtually shuts carless residents out of the job market. [FN24] Many of Macon's employers are not transit-accessible at all, because they are located on the area's periphery, far from any bus line. [FN25] By building highways, government has encouraged employers to relocate to such areas. [FN26]
American public transit is inadequate because transit is funded far less generously than highways: between fiscal year 1992 and 1999, states had more than $33.8 billion in federal funding available to spend on either highways or public transportation, but spent only 12.5% of that sum on public transit. [FN27] Nearly half of that 12.5% was spent by two states (New York and California) [FN28] and six states (Delaware, Kansas, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming) used none of their allotted money on mass transit. [FN29] Direct federal support for transit has only occasionally been more generous. Between 1980 and 1998, federal support for state and local public transit declined sharply in real terms, *265 increasing by only one-third while the cost of living nearly doubled. [FN30] During the same period, federal highway grants soared by 114%. [FN31]
As a result of these trends, transit agencies have periodically been forced to either raise fares or reduce service. For example, in 1995, Congress passed a budget reducing operating assistance [FN32] to public transit by over forty percent. [FN33] As a result, half of all American transit agencies raised fares, cut back service, and/or laid off workers in late 1995 and early 1996. [FN34] Similarly, in the early 1990s thirty-one percent of transit systems took similar steps [FN35] in order to pay costs imposed by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act [FN36] (which requires transit systems to spend $1.4 billion per year to make transit service accessible to the disabled). [FN37] Transit fares increased by 150% between 1980 and 1998, *266 while gasoline prices were decreasing. [FN38] As transit agencies raised fares and reduced service, transit ridership declined from 8.9 billion trips in 1989 to 7.7 billion in 1995. [FN39] Conversely, when federal support for transit increased in the late 1990s, [FN40] ridership rose to nine billion in 1999--the highest ridership level in forty years. [FN41]

C. The Anti-Transit Story
Why do so many American communities have so little transit service? Pundits and politicians justify the status quo on the ground that, in the words of U.S. Representative Tom DeLay, "mass transit . . . has failed in this country" [FN42] because "[p]ublic use of mass transit has fallen by two billion passengers since 1960, despite a taxpayers' investment of more than $100 billion during that same period of time." [FN43] Similarly, one newspaper columnist writes: "[f]or decades we have been bombarded with demands that we get out of our cars and into mass transit . . . . Nevertheless, we drive." [FN44] The "story" told by transit critics is a simple one: government spends money on public transit, and most people don't use it. Thus, public transit is a waste of money. [FN45]
This article tells a sharply different story: far from encouraging people *267 to use buses and trains, government at all levels has inadvertently sabotaged public transit. For nearly a century, governmental transportation, education, housing and tax policies have reduced transit ridership by encouraging Americans to move from transit-friendly cities to suburbs with little or no transit service. It logically follows that if government reverses those policies, transit ridership will continue to increase.


II. How Government Has Sabotaged Public Transit
Far from fighting a losing war against "America's romance with the automobile," [FN46] government has forced Americans into cars by eliminating non-drivers' access to jobs and community facilities. For most of the 20th century, government has funneled billions of dollars into highway construction. [FN47] Highway construction increased driving and reduced transit ridership by encouraging development to shift from older, transit-accessible areas to newer suburbs, most of which are inaccessible except by automobile. [FN48] In addition, government at all levels has reduced transit system revenues (and thus transit service) through unfunded mandates; [FN49] has adopted education, housing and tax policies that indirectly shifted development to suburbs; [FN50] and has enacted zoning laws that made those suburbs as auto-dependent as possible (thereby depressing transit ridership by making it more difficult for suburbanites to use transit). [FN51]

A. Highway Policy


1. How Government Put Highways In The Driver's Seat
Early in the 20th century, the state and federal governments began to build new roads. State and local governments could have levied user fees to force drivers to reimburse local treasuries for the costs of streets, *268 traffic maintenance, and police services, but instead frequently chose to subsidize drivers by relying on general taxation. [FN52] Thus, government essentially taxed the general public (including railroads and transit users) to support drivers. [FN53] By contrast, transit providers were typically private and unsubsidized. [FN54] To make matters worse, the government often controlled transit fares and, despite World War I-era inflation, did not allow them to rise. [FN55] Because government regulated streetcars while subsidizing drivers, one-third of American streetcar companies were bankrupt by 1919. [FN56]
Between 1919 and 1929, every state adopted a motor fuel tax and earmarked the revenue to fund highway construction projects. [FN57] By 1927, highways were second only to education as recipients of state and local expenditure, and one-third of state assistance to local government was for highway construction. [FN58]
In 1921, the federal government began to support highway building, by enacting the Federal Road Act [FN59] that designated 200,000 miles of road as eligible for federal matching funds, and by creating the Bureau of Public Roads to plan an interstate highway system. [FN60] By that date, government at all levels (federal, state, and local) was pouring $1.4 billion into highways. [FN61] Adjusted to present dollars, this amounts to $12.48 billion. [FN62] At the same time, most transit systems were privately *269 owned, received no government assistance, and paid taxes to support the highway system and other government functions. [FN63]
During the 1920s and 1930s, government's highway empire continued to grow. By 1940, government spent $2.7 billion--$30.95 billion in present dollars [FN64]--on highways. [FN65] By contrast, at that time the total operating costs of all intra-city bus and rail systems (except commuter rail) were $661 million--mostly private rather than governmental spending. [FN66]
In the postwar years, government intervention on behalf of highways accelerated. In 1950, government funneled $4.6 billion--$30.63 billion in present dollars [FN67]--into highways, and virtually nothing into transit. [FN68] In 1954, President Eisenhower appointed a committee on highways. The committee endorsed a massive highway spending plan that was enacted into law as the Interstate Highway Act, [FN69] which created a 41,000 mile Interstate Highway System. [FN70] Under the Highway Act, the federal government paid for ninety percent of the system's construction and maintenance costs, states paid ten percent, and municipalities paid nothing. [FN71] By contrast, the federal government did not begin to subsidize public transit until the 1960s. [FN72] In fact, between 1950 and 1970 vehicle miles of transit service declined nationally by thirty-seven percent. [FN73] Today, federal road spending exceeds federal transit spending by a margin of more than four to one. [FN74] Moreover, state governments are *270 often even more pro-road and anti-transit than the federal government; for example, some states require fuel tax revenues to be spent exclusively on roads, [FN75] and others have simply spent as little as possible on transit. [FN76]


2. Highway Spending and Transit: Recipe for Reduced Ridership


a. First, Use Highways To Create Suburbs . . .
State and federal pro-highway policies have reduced transit ridership by encouraging people and jobs to move from transit-friendly cities to newer suburbs. [FN77] At first, highways merely enabled commuters to live farther away from downtown jobs, thus giving commuters easy access to central business districts from once-distant suburbs. [FN78] However, where highway-driven residential development came, commercial development inevitably followed, as retail businesses moved to suburbs in order to serve those suburbs' new residents and other businesses followed their employees to suburbia. [FN79] As one federal court has pointed out, *271 "[h]ighways create demand for travel and [suburban] expansion by their very existence." [FN80]
For example, Washington's Capital Beltway, a sixty-six-mile long highway surrounding the city, was designed to allow East Coast motorists to bypass the city. [FN81] Instead, the Beltway became a magnet for office and retail centers that sprouted near Beltway exits, such as Tyson's Corner, a satellite downtown in Fairfax County, Virginia. [FN82] As suburbs grew more populated in Washington and in other cities, they grew more congested, which caused politicians to build even more suburban roads (ostensibly to relieve congestion) spurring development in even more suburbs. [FN83] In fact, each of the fifty largest metro areas in America added new road capacity in the 1980s and 1990s. [FN84]
As a consequence of government's road-building sprees, [FN85] among *272 other factors, [FN86] many older American cities suffered enormous population losses by the end of the 20th century. [FN87] At the end of World War II, roughly seventy percent of metropolitan Americans lived in central cities. [FN88] By 1990, only about forty percent of metropolitan Americans, and only 31.3% of all Americans, lived in central cities. [FN89] Jobs, as well as people, have fled to suburbia: today, two-thirds of all new jobs are in suburbs. [FN90]
Indeed, even organizations generally regarded as supportive of new roads and suburban expansion implicitly concede that highways affect the location of development. For example, in 1999 the National Association of Home Builders (which favors increased road spending) [FN91] *273 conducted a survey that asked respondents what amenities would encourage them to move to a new area; respondents' top choice (endorsed by fifty-five percent of respondents) was "highway access." [FN92] If highway access makes a suburb more desirable, it follows that government shifts people and jobs to a suburb by building highways there.


b. . . . Then Keep Transit Out Of The Suburbs
The state and federal governments' highway spending spree might not have eviscerated transit if those governments had served suburban employers and subdivisions with buses and rail lines. Instead, government effectively decreased service for non-drivers while increasing service for drivers: that is, government drove private transit companies out of business by funding competition from highways, [FN93] took over what was left of transit service, [FN94] and actually reduced transit service while it was doing so (by thirty-seven percent between 1950 and 1970). [FN95]
As a result, most of the suburbs created by government highway spending have minimal or nonexistent public transit. For example, the most transit-friendly American metro area is New York City and its suburbs, where transit systems provide fifty percent more service hours per capita than in the second best-served metro area. [FN96] Yet even in the New York area, courts have acknowledged that auto ownership is "a necessity and not a luxury in the suburbs where mass transit facilities are *274 not as readily available to residents as they are to city dwellers." [FN97] The situation in more auto-oriented metro areas is as bad or even worse: as noted above, the majority of entry-level jobs in metro areas as diverse as Baltimore, Cleveland, and Atlanta are inaccessible to transit-dependent urbanites or nearly so. [FN98] In fact, entire suburban counties lack transit service: Atlanta's second largest suburban county, Gwinnett County, which had a population of 522,000 people in 1998, had no public transportation whatsoever. [FN99] As a result, news stories throughout America routinely refer to cars as a "necessity." [FN100]
Indeed, even opponents of public transit spending admit that highway-created suburbs are far more auto-dependent than cities. For example, in 1995 U.S. Representative Nick Smith justified transit cutbacks on the *275 grounds that "[i]nstead of the jobs being in the inner city and the suburbs needing transportation downtown, now the jobs are outside of the cities. The main reasons for mass transit for tax dollar subsidies just [aren't] there anymore." [FN101] In other words, anti-transit politicians seek to grind transit users under the heel of a self-fulfilling prophecy: they have reduced demand for public transit by building highways that shifted jobs to suburbia, and now claim that transit service should be reduced still more because--thanks to their own policies--jobs have moved to suburbia.
In sum, government at all levels has systematically reduced public transit ridership by building highways that made newer suburbs possible, while often failing to create public transit service to those suburbs. But highway spending is merely the tip of government's anti-transit iceberg.

B. Unfunded Mandates: How Big Brother Makes Transit Unaffordable
In recent years, federal road spending has exceeded transit spending by a margin of over four to one. [FN102] Some commentators suggest that this gap is appropriate or even too narrow, because transit systems receive fifteen to twenty percent of all federal spending even though transit users comprise about five percent of all commuters. [FN103] This argument overlooks the fact that federal transit spending is at least partially canceled out by a variety of federal mandates.


1. The Americans with Disabilities Act
The Americans with Disabilities Act requires that transit providers make any newly purchased or leased bus or train "readily accessible to, and usable by individuals with disabilities," [FN104] and that transit systems *276 provide paratransit service [FN105] to individuals who, due to their disability, are unable to use traditional buses and trains without assistance, [FN106] need to travel at a time when buses or trains accessible to the disabled are unavailable, [FN107] or are unable to travel to a bus or train stop. [FN108] The ADA alone cost transit providers $1.4 billion per year in the mid-1990s, about one-third of federal transit spending. [FN109]


2. Labor Laws that Limit Transit Operators' Ability to Reduce Labor Costs
Section 13(c) of the Federal Transit Act, [FN110] a statute enacted to ensure that unionized transit workers did not lose their collective bargaining rights when local governments took over financially beleaguered private bus and rail lines, [FN111] in effect mandates "that transit agencies pay six years' wages and benefits to their employees affected by layoffs." [FN112] This statute alone may have cost transit providers $2-3 billion per year by the mid-1990s, [FN113] about half of all federal transit spending at that time. [FN114] The federal government also inflates transit systems' labor costs by imposing federally mandated wage rates for federally funded construction. [FN115]
*277


3. Limitations upon Transit Systems' Use of Parts Manufactured in Foreign
Countries [FN116]
The "Buy American" provisions of the Federal Transit Act provide that steel, iron and manufactured goods used in transit projects must be produced in the United States [FN117] unless the Secretary of Transportation chooses to waive this requirement. [FN118] Waivers are allowed if application of the "Buy American" statute is not in the public interest, American-made components are not of satisfactory quality, if the cost of including domestic material will increase the cost of the overall project by over twenty-five percent, or the cost of the American-made components is sixty percent of the cost of the goods at issue. [FN119] Contractors on transit projects must sign "Buy American Certificates" that describe the extent to which their goods are American-made. [FN120]


4. Limitations on Charter and School Bus Service in Competition with the
Private Sector [FN121]
The Federal Transit Act provides that a transit system receiving federal aid may not provide charter bus transportation service outside the urban area in which it provides regularly scheduled mass transportation service if the recipient will thereby "foreclose a private operator from providing intercity charter bus service if the private operator can provide the service." [FN122] The same act provides that transit systems receiving federal aid may not "provide schoolbus transportation that exclusively transports students and school personnel in competition with a private operator." [FN123]
Every dollar that transit systems spend or forego in order to comply with these federal rules and regulations is a dollar that they cannot use to expand or preserve service. In fact, transit agencies have occasionally reduced service in order to finance compliance with federal mandates: *278 for example, in the mid-1990s thirty-one percent of American transit agencies reduced service, raised fares or laid off employees in order to pay costs imposed by the Americans with Disabilities Act. [FN124]

C. Other Anti-Transit Policies: Or, How To Attack Transit By Attacking Cities
Highway spending is hardly the only government expenditure that has reduced transit use or moved jobs away from transit users. Over the past several decades, a wide variety of government policies have indirectly encouraged Americans to move to auto-dependent suburbs.


1. Federal Housing Administration Mortgage Insurance
Since 1934, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has insured long-term, low down payment mortgages against default. [FN125] By 1986, the federal government backed two-thirds of the single-family mortgages in the United States. [FN126] For many years, FHA guaranteed home loans only in "low-risk" areas. [FN127] FHA guidelines defined low-risk areas as areas that were thinly populated, dominated by newer homes, and had no African-American or immigrant enclaves nearby--areas that disproportionately tended to be suburban. [FN128] In fact, FHA manuals *279 specifically taught that the FHA should favor newer, lower-density areas because "crowded neighborhoods lessen desirability [and] older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy." [FN129] Public transit is less feasible in lower-density areas, because as houses and apartments are spread farther apart, fewer people can conveniently walk to bus and train stops. [FN130] So by bribing homeowners to move to low-density suburbs, the FHA inadvertently reduced transit ridership by causing population to shift to areas where public transit was inconvenient or inadequate.


2. Public Housing Policies that have Concentrated Poverty and Crime in Cities
Public housing policies, by concentrating poverty and crime in cities, have driven middle-class families out of cities and into auto-oriented suburbs. New Deal-era federal housing legislation provided that any municipality desiring public housing had to either create a municipal housing authority or cooperate with another city's housing authority. [FN131] Economically homogenous suburbs were able to avoid public housing by refusing to create or cooperate with housing authorities. [FN132] Moreover, the federal government's "equivalent elimination requirement" kept public housing out of suburbs by mandating that one unit of substandard housing be eliminated for each unit of public housing built. [FN133] Because most suburbs had little substandard housing, even suburbs that wished to participate in the public housing program were excluded. [FN134] As a result *280 of these limitations, many suburbs have little or no public housing. [FN135]
By law, public housing projects are packed with poverty: forty percent of all occupants of existing public housing must earn less than thirty percent of their metro area's median income. [FN136] Because homogeneously poor areas tend, other factors being equal, to be more crime-ridden than more affluent areas, [FN137] public housing projects are "havens for crime." [FN138] Nationally, public housing residents are two and a half times as likely as other Americans to be victimized by gun-related crimes--and some public housing projects are even more horrendous. [FN139] For example, Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes housing projects contain only one-half of one percent of that city's population, but account for eleven percent of the city's murders. [FN140] Similarly, a 1993 study found that the incidence of crime in the Los Angeles housing projects was three times greater than crime rates in surrounding high-crime neighborhoods. [FN141] By concentrating public housing in central cities, the federal government has concentrated poverty and crime in cities, thus accelerating the flight of the middle class and their employers to auto-oriented suburbs, [FN142] which in turn (as noted above) has reduced the share of people and jobs served *281 by public transit. [FN143]


3. Prestigious Schools for Suburbs and "Bad" Schools for Cities
Over the past several decades, many American parents have moved to suburbia in order to keep their children out of urban public schools. [FN144] This problem is in part a consequence of state governments' school assignment policies. In most of America, students are assigned to public schools based on their home addresses: [FN145] urban students must generally attend school within an urban school district, while suburban children attend suburban schools. Thus, a public school's student body typically reflects the city or neighborhood in which the students reside. Because cities tend to be more socially diverse than suburbs, [FN146] the average city school will nearly always have more low-income children than the average suburban school. Other factors being equal or nearly so, low-income children are harder to educate and achieve less than middle-income children, because "socioeconomic status (SES) and family background influence a student's achievement in school." [FN147] This is so because "children reared in low socioeconomic status [households] tend to be less intellectually stimulated and, consequently, tend to be less prepared for school which ultimately impacts on a child's achievements." [FN148] It follows that schools packed with low-income *282 children will usually be less prestigious than middle-class schools. Thus, so long as state and local laws require urban children to attend schools packed with low-income children, urban schools will have bad reputations that drive away middle-class parents.
In recent decades, the federal courts have widened the gap between city and suburb in the name of "desegregation:" the courts have often required cities to create racial balance in urban schools, [FN149] while allowing lily-white suburbs to continue maintaining lily-white schools. [FN150] These rulings ensured that city schools would be more racially diverse than suburban schools, which in turn meant that because blacks tend to be poorer than whites, [FN151] city schools, even those in affluent areas, would contain more low-income children than suburban schools. This desegregation, in turn has made city schools less prestigious and thus less appealing to middle- class families. [FN152] As noted above, when middle-class families flee to auto-dominated suburbs, they are more likely to drive to work, and transit ridership plummets.


4. A Tax Code that Favors Driving and Suburban Life
Employers may provide parking to their employees as a tax-free fringe benefit worth up to $170 a month, while the tax-free ceiling on transit passes is only sixty-five dollars per month. [FN153] To a much greater extent than European countries, America taxes income and savings rather than consumption. [FN154] Thus, the tax code encourages Americans to purchase space-consuming items and the large suburban houses necessary to house those items. [FN155] Moreover, state and federal fuel taxes are too small to recapture the social costs of driving, such as highway spending not paid *283 for by fuel taxes, [FN156] the costs of auto-induced air pollution, the costs of medical care resulting from auto collisions, the costs of military spending to protect Persian Gulf oil, and the costs of police enforcement of auto-related laws such as traffic and parking laws. [FN157]
These policies have combined to place older cities in a vicious spiral of decay: as middle-class families fled to the suburbs, urban tax bases diminished, causing local government to raise taxes or reduce services, further accelerating middle-class flight, creating additional pressures for tax increases, and so on. [FN158] As urban neighborhoods emptied out, middle-class families were replaced by poor ones, [FN159] causing crime to increase, [FN160] thus accelerating middle-class flight.
In turn, the middle-class exodus from older cities and neighborhoods has reduced transit ridership in two ways. First, as employees and employers fled cities, they relocated to suburbs with minimal public transit, reducing their opportunities to use public transit. [FN161] Second, such reductions in ridership have sometimes pushed public transit into a vicious spiral: reduced ridership was used to justify reductions (or to prevent improvements) in service, [FN162] which in turn reduced ridership, which decreased transit system revenues, causing additional service reductions and fare increases. [FN163]

*284 D. How Zoning Makes Suburbs Auto-Dependent
While the federal and state governments were driving Americans into suburbs, local governments were (with state and federal support) making those suburbs as auto-dependent as possible through zoning legislation. In the 1920s, the federal Department of Commerce drafted the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (SZEA). [FN164] SZEA, which was quickly enacted by the majority of states, [FN165] granted municipalities power to regulate the location and use of buildings. [FN166] The SZEA declared that zoning laws would be designed to "prevent the overcrowding of land [and] to avoid undue concentration of population" [FN167]--in other words, to reduce population density. SZEA-inspired zoning ordinances have artificially reduced densities [FN168] by limiting apartment construction [FN169] or by forcing all lots in a neighborhood to be of a minimum size. [FN170] For example, in 1970 more than ninety-nine percent of vacant land in New Jersey was zoned to exclude multifamily housing, and in Connecticut's Fairfield County eighty-nine percent of vacant land was subject to minimum lot requirements of one acre or more. [FN171] Such anti-density *285 zoning reduces transit use because, as noted above, [FN172] public transit is less feasible in low-density areas: as residences are spread farther apart, fewer people can walk short distances to bus and train stops. By using highway spending to create suburbs while zoning those suburbs to be auto-dependent, government reduced transit providers' revenues in two ways: first, it reduced transit providers' urban ridership, and second, it made it difficult for transit providers to serve suburbanites. By reducing transit providers' revenues, government forced them to cut back service and raise fares, [FN173] thus causing ridership losses that caused additional revenue losses. [FN174]


III. Does It Matter?
It could be argued that no matter what government does to encourage transit use, the inherent advantages of autos make any attempt to increase transit patronage futile. Even transit supporters sometimes fall victim to fatalism: one pro-transit commentator complains that "[t]he popularity of the automobile has long been the bane of urban planners who wish to increase transit ridership [because of the public] preference for the convenience and freedom that the automobile represents." [FN175] The facts prove otherwise. If people have enough transportation options and density is high enough to make transit efficient, most people will use it. For example, seventy-four percent of commuters to New York's central business district use public transit to get to work, as opposed to 1.8% of commuters to Orlando's business district. [FN176] Surely New Yorkers and Floridians desire "freedom and convenience" equally, but in New York, government evidently does less to make transit inconvenient. [FN177] Even in *286 suburbia, transit can be an option. For example, in Rosslyn, one of Washington, D.C.'s suburban employment centers, [FN178] 20.1% of employees use transit to get to work, [FN179] more than in the central business districts of many major cities. [FN180] Transit-oriented employment centers such as Rosslyn and Manhattan have survived eighty years of government hostility to public transit: if government stopped sabotaging public transit, these centers might be even more transit-friendly. Government can increase transit use if it stops sabotaging areas already serviced by transit, [FN181] and eliminates zoning laws that make transit inefficient by artificially reducing suburban population density. [FN182] Even if the state and federal governments do not increase transit funding by one cent, they can increase transit service and give Americans more transportation choices if they take a few actions.
* Stop funding highways and road widenings in suburbs with minimal or nonexistent public transit, because, as noted above, such highways shift development to auto-dominated suburbs. [FN183]
* Compensate transit systems for unfunded mandates that increase transit systems' costs, or eliminate such mandates altogether. [FN184]
* Break the link between schooling and residence, by allowing urban children to attend prestigious suburban and/or private schools rather than marooning them in urban schools with bad reputations. [FN185]
*287 * Reform the tax code to favor work and saving over the consumption of fuel and land. [FN186]
* Prohibit local governments from enacting zoning laws--such as minimum home and lot sizes and restrictions on apartment buildings--that artificially reduce density. [FN187]


IV. Conclusion
Far from "bombarding [Americans] with demands that we get out of our cars and into mass transit," [FN188] government has bombarded Americans with reasons to drive everywhere: highways that make it convenient to relocate to suburbs, zoning laws that make those suburbs as auto-dominated as possible, FHA loans that have bribed Americans to move to those suburbs, school systems that march middle-class families from city to suburb, and public housing projects that scare them away from urban neighborhoods. If we want a society where Americans are free to leave the driving to someone else, we need not drag Americans out of their cars. Rather, all we need to is to consign government's anti-transit policies to the ash heap of history.

(footnotes omitted due to length of article)