> Putting that problem aside for a moment, it says that transit gets a smaller share of the funding pie. So what? Roads blanket the nation--I don't think this article would suggest operating public transportation to compete with every road.

If you're going to use the argument that roads are more useful than transit because they cover the whole nation, then you're making the same argument the article is making for transit, just with different parameters. Rather than paint it black and white, both systems are needed to increase overall transportation efficiency as a whole. Transit is effective in dense areas like large cities. Roads are effective in smaller less dense areas where space isn't a premium.

Additionally, everyone likes to gloss over the fact that you mention where public transit in the US is largely government owned and operated, therefore the expenses include all costs associated with the entire system. For roads, however, only the road cost is covered. This is a different kind of unfairness. It makes roads and auto travel look cheap because costs are dispersed over different parties and items: government pays for the road, drivers pay for their car and maintenance, buildings hide the cost of private parking.

Meanwhile transit systems look expensive because the numbers include all associated expenses. To fix the problem, I actually think transit systems should be allowed to be privatized and treated on the same level as roads, that is just like roads, the government allocates land use for mass transit and private companies operate the system. Additionally most of the recent laws surrounding (free) parking and the interstate highway systems require additional roads and parking for every new development. So ridiculous things start happening like low-income housing in a dense area having unused parking spaces being built to satisfy minimum parking requirements. Downtown road improvements requiring unnecessarily large intersections and allocations to satisfy level of service requirements.

> Then there's the usual "OMG induced demand": "road building as already mentioned does nothing to combat traffic" because of induced demand. This is specious. Yes building roads encourages people to go places. That's the point.

The problem is roads are a 2D system with limited scalability while cities are 3D environments that often scale in 3 dimensions. Furthermore automobiles most of the time are used to inefficiently carry 1 person but they have a large footprint. So at a certain point, traffic congestion measures actually do not increase throughput linearly based on investment. So if you want "people to go places" you start finding yourself with ridiculously expensive projects that actually just end up making the problem worse.

Many cities in the world have found solutions to traffic problems and they involve one of 2 things:

1. Introduce a toll or congestion fee thereby encouraging only those that truly want to use the road to use it.

2. Remove high capacity "arterial" roads thus causing traffic to be more evenly distributed across multiple low throughput paths.

The first item operates on the concept that even a relatively small fee will cause standard supply and demand rules to apply rather than users aggressively trying to take advantage of a "free" resource.

The second item operates on the concept that traffic distributed across more direct paths will lead to less overall system traffic compared to a system that encourages everyone to take the perceived fastest and highest throughput path.