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subsidy from the public trough since the wages in question
are not public property to begin with.
Cost of Traffic Congestion. Goddard relies on the
Texas Transportation Institute's estimate that congestion
costs Americans $100 billion per year. But he does not ask
how much longer travel would take without the automobile.
Nor does he note that a primary reason for increasing con-
gestion is the fact that so many billions of dollars in
highway user fees have been spent on rail transit projects
rather than activities that could really reduce con-
gestion.17
Air Pollution and Health Costs. These are certainly
two of the adverse effects of autos. If autos were elimi-
nated, no doubt many pollution and health costs would be
reduced significantly, but others would be created. It is
difficult to say what the net effects would be.
Casualty Insurance Premiums. Since those premiums are
paid by auto drivers themselves, they can hardly qualify as
a subsidy. The same is true of "drivers' costs in highway
tolls," which Goddard does not calculate but says "could
also [be] added."18
In sum, Goddard's $293.2 billion subsidy turns out to
have been a mere $10.5 billion subsidy in 1995. When spread
across the 143.3 billion gallons of fuel consumed by Ameri-
can motorists in 1995, this results in merely a 7 cent per
gallon subsidy.19 With motorists going about 3.7 trillion
passenger-miles, that works out to a subsidy of about one-
quarter of a penny per passenger-mile.20
Subsidies to Transit
American urban transit riders paid $6.3 billion in
fares in 1994, but transit operations cost $17.3 billion.21
Transit capital improvements cost another $5.6 billion,
leaving a $16.6 billion deficit--$6.0 billion of which was
paid by highway users.22 With transit riders traveling some
40 billion passenger-miles,23 the result is an average
subsidy of about 42 cents per transit passenger-mile, rough-
ly 150 times more than similar subsidies to auto travel.
Subsidies from auto drivers to transit have been grow-
ing since 1974, when some states started spending gas taxes
on transit. In 1983 Congress followed their example by
dedicating first 1 cent and later 2 cents of the federal
gasoline tax to mass transit. By 1995 cumulative diversions