As much as 20 percent of federal

transportation funding goes to transit, which serves less than 2 percent

of travelers. Of the many rationales offered in defense of disproportionately

high transit spending, the most novel put forth this year is the bizarre

claim by the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP) that auto ownership

home ownership opportunities.

Members of lower-income households

who cannot afford cars account for a majority (approximately two-thirds)

of today's transit riders, and the emergence of prosperity among

this group threatens transit with the loss of its captive constituency

and further shrinkage of its miniscule market share. Public transit's

share of urban travel has plunged 75 percent in four decades, from a 7.1

percent share in 1960 to 1.8 percent in 2000.

At some point, ridership will

be so low that transit will lose the political support it needs to make

its annual $7 billion claim on the highway trust fund. Among the social

forces combining to put transit at risk is welfare reform in the mid-1990s

and its success in raising low-income households to economic self-sufficiency

and financial independence.

Much of this has occurred by

putting former welfare recipients to work.

As federal welfare policy focuses

on raising incomes and putting people to work, welfare analysts have recognized

the importance of transportation and mobility in linking the unemployed

to the widest choice of good jobs. Because transit is slow and reaches

only a fraction of the places offering employment in any metropolitan

area, many of these same experts have come to realize that ready access

to an automobile is the key to a good job and a prosperous work career.

In 1999, President Bill Clinton

earned the ire of anti-car environmentalists when he succeeded in changing

food stamp eligibility standards to ensure that the working poor could

buy a car without jeopardizing their benefits. Subsequent studies by scholars

at the Brookings Institution and the Progressive Policy Institute have

shown the value of auto mobility to upward mobility. According to one

recent Brookings Study, "Most welfare recipients do not have access

to a dependable automobile, and research indicates that lack of access

to an automobile is one of the most prevalent barriers to employment."

But the transit advocates challenge

this bipartisan belief in the importance of auto ownership to sustainable

employment. An STPP representative testified to Congress:

"It is indeed ironic that

many social scientists believe that the best way to help former welfare

recipients secure jobs is to give them automobile purchase assistance,

thereby trapping them into the poverty cycle even more profoundly, as

the poor typically end up with less reliable cars which are more expensive

to operate and maintain."

Instead, the STPP urges the

government to fund bicycles, car-sharing programs, and more transit. As

Congress crafts the new federal transportation bill, there is a risk that

some members may actually believe this kind of advice and divert scarce

federal financial resources to counterproductive programs that both waste

money and hurt the poor.

Not content simply to get the

poor onto bikes, the STPP also urges land use restrictions to force people

to live in more compact communities that lend themselves to greater transit

use and less car dependence and ownership. In support of greater land

use regulations, the STPP contends that more sprawl leads to more transportation

spending and that greater transportation spending comes at the expense

of home ownership and housing affordability. Conversely, as the STPP hypothesis

argues, less sprawl would lead to more affordable housing and more home

ownership.

To support its theory about

the inverse relationship between transportation costs and home ownership,

the STPP has presented data for 26 large U.S. metropolitan areas. However,

a casual examination of the data confirms no such relationship. Indeed,

the data show precisely the opposite: The greater the degree of sprawl,

the lower the transportation costs, the more affordable the housing, and

the greater the regional home ownership rate.

The lessons for Congress from

the STPP's misplaced effort and revealing data are that automobiles

continue to gain market share, are the preferred and most cost-effective

form of mobility, and have an important role to play in helping low-income

families gain financial independence.

Despite these obvious advantages,

the federal transportation program has suffered from an advanced case

of mission creep over the past several decades and now spends tens of

billions of dollars on marginal projects that benefit only a small fraction

of the traveling public.

Whether it is money for the

renovation of covered bridges, thousands of pork-barrel projects, buses

and trolleys, historic preservation, hiking and biking trails, maglev

research, or highway beautification programs, all of these diversions

are funded by the fuel taxes paid by motorists who suffer from worsening

congestion because of these diversions.

[This commentary is excerpted

a Heritage Foundation study, "Transit Advocates Want the Working

Poor to Use Bikes and Buses, Not Cars," by Wendell Cox and Ronald

Utt. Cox, Principal of the Wendell Cox Consultancy in St. Louis, Missouri,

is a Visiting Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and co-author of the landmark

study by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, "A Common Sense Approach

to Transportation in the Atlanta Region." Utt, the Herbert and Joyce

Morgan Senior Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic

Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, is the scheduled keynote speaker

at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation's Policy Briefing Luncheon

on Nov. 25. The complete study may be accessed at www.heritage.org/Research/SmartGrowth/bg1687.cfm.

The Georgia Public Policy Foundation is an independent think tank that

proposes practical, market-oriented approaches to public policy to improve

the lives of Georgians.]