This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 4th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Government-run mass transit systems are facing more pressure than ever.

Even in some of the densest urban areas, private ride hailing services are providing competitive

rates for even many daily commuters.

How should federal, state, and local agencies respond?

Randall O'Toole is author of the forthcoming Cato book, Romance of the Rails. We spoke this week.

Data that I know that you are very alert to is what fraction of a metropolitan area makes use of transit on generally a daily basis for getting to and from work.

Where does that fraction stand today and where is it headed?

Well, right now about 5% of American commuters take transit to work.

And that sounds like it could be a lot, but the surveys ask, how do you usually get to work by transit?

And it turns out 5% say they usually get to work by transit,

but in fact they only take transit about 70% of the time. So really only a little over 3%, 3 to 4% use transit on any given day.

And almost all of those are in New York City,

almost half of those are in New York City.

Almost half of those are in New York City.

So outside of New York City, it's a very small percentage of people.

In most American urban areas, it's less than 2%. So if transit disappeared tomorrow

you would notice a big difference in New York you might notice a small difference in New York. You might notice a small difference in Washington, Boston,

Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco and maybe Seattle. Everywhere else, the most thing

you would notice that there be a lot less congestion because you'd have a lot of

empty buses off the road.

So in New York City, what's the population per square mile? There are parts of New York City that have well over 100,000 people per square mile on average in the city, including

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