This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 4th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Taking pollutants out of the air is a daunting challenge, but taking people out of their cars and putting them on transit lines is an ineffective

way of doing so.

So says Cato Institute Senior Fellow, Randall O'Toole.

Well, first of all, commuting is only 15% of our travel. More than 85% of our

automobile travel is non-commuting. And so having transit to take you to work is not really necessarily going to reduce the amount of driving

we do.

Transit is very ineffective at just about anything except for taking people to work to downtown areas.

Most people don't work downtown, so transit isn't even very effective for most commuters.

So transit is not going to be a solution.

What transit is is a high cost alternative to the automobile.

And that's what people don't understand.

They think, oh, transit is cheap because you know

it costs a 85 cents or a dollar or something to ride the metro but in fact for every dollar

you spend writing it somebody else is spending several more dollars subsidizing it.

How do the various forms of transit stack up in terms of greenhouse gases?

In terms of greenhouse gases, buses produce a lot of greenhouse gases.

Generally, most buses produce more greenhouse gases in the average sport utility vehicle per passenger mile.

Light rail produces more greenhouse gases than the average passenger car.

Light rail meaning trolley cars. Heavy rail like the

Washington Metro meaning subways or elevators. A lot of heavy rail produces more greenhouse gases than the average automobile and no light rail or heavy rail produces as little greenhouse gas as the more fuel efficient automobiles on the market.

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