This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 27th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The historically high price of gas has many transportation planners making a big push on behalf of a new

investment in rail for commuters.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole says even with high gas prices, those arguments just don't stand up.

If you're going by my commute in the morning, the historically high gas prices did in fact mean much more packed trains

as people made the decision away from driving into work and in favor of taking the train.

So at least from my commute, that seems to have some merit.

Well, actually it doesn't because your commute

is on a train with very limited capacity.

And this is a surprise is that we keep,

we've often been told that train lines have the capacity of a 10-lane freeway or a 12-lane freeway,

but the reality is that even the Washington subway and certainly light rail lines have far lower capacities in

highways.

And so you've got a limited capacity and you've got trains that tend to be fairly full at

rush hour and you add a few more people and suddenly you're really

jammed.

Now when you actually look down at the numbers, it turns out driving dropped during the period

of high gas prices by about 4%, and transit ridership

grew by about 4%. But driving was 99 times higher than transit ridership in the first

place, so that means transit ridership only made up for a tiny

percentage, one or two percent, of the decline in driving.

...