This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 13, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In a world of high gas prices, what is the federal role in transportation planning?

Just how much federal money should be diverted to transit, if any.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole, author of the Best Laid Plans, says the public has some surprisingly nuanced

if occasionally wrong views about which levels of government

should pay for roads and rails.

Well, the data indicated that the public thinks that it's okay for the federal government to take US gas taxes and spend it on highways,

but they think that light rail and other transit should be funded by state and local taxpayers and

bike paths and pedestrian paths should be funded by local taxpayers. The problem is

that the federal government doesn't spend gas tax money on highways. It spends more than 20% of it on

transit and a lot of it is in an open bucket. Whoever grabs in the bucket and gets the money first gets it.

And that's not true with the highway money.

The highway money is not an open bucket, but since the transit money is an open

bucket, cities all over the country are grabbing money out of that bucket.

And the way to get the most money is to build light rail or some other expensive kind of

transit, because then you get the most money if you spend the most money.

So even though most people seem to understand that gas taxes were originally created to fund

highways and they're, we call it a highway trust fund because we

trusted that money will be used for highways in fact it should be called the highway

mistrust fund because Congress starting in the 1980s,

started diverting money out of that fund

...