Invisibile on the trend line

Wendell Cox posts all sorts of very cool stuff at publicpurpose.com. His latest are compilations from the National Transit Database.

We hear so often that approximately 4.5% of Americans commute via transit. But what about all other travel? Transit's share of total vehicle-miles? It was 1.51% in 2005; it was last above 10% in 1955. It was 5.19% in the mid 1960s when the federal coffers became available to the industry. Several hundred billion dollars of subsidies spent since then are invisible on 100-year transit use trend line.

And these data include New York city which accounted for 41% of national transit use.

Matt Kahn (now of UCLA) and I will be blogging about these matters at WSJ Econblog later this week.