Bill Steigerwald of Townhall takes a look a mass transit with Wendell Cox. It isn’t pretty.

When you talk about transit in the United States, you have to be talking about best prisoner awards. These systems are a scourge on taxpayers. There are some that do some wonderful things, but nobody does it all right.

I keep arguing in my own mind, who is more responsible for the abject failure of transit in the United States? And mind you — transit expenditures have gone up more than 300 percent adjusted for inflation since 1970 and ridership has gone up less than 20 percent. There is no other sector of the economy, including health care, where I can find escalation even close to that. Transit holds the record. It is a damned outrage how bad transit has been.

Wendell doesn’t pull his punches either.

…the first reason why there is no hope for transit is that it can not be designed to be competitive with the automobile, except for very specific locations — that really only being a downtown area. It has to be a good concentrated downtown area, and they don’t come much better in my view than Pittsburgh. The other reason why there is no hope for transit is that whatever you give them will be frittered away without any impact whatsoever.

Frittered? Why?

The whole point of transit is to maximize costs. The management-labor arrangements maximize costs and so do the vendor arrangements with respect to capital expenditures. … In Europe what they discovered about 15 years ago is that centralized funding creates all sorts of incentives for locals to waste money. So just about everywhere in Europe they have stopped their national transit programs and forced it down to the local level. They’ve said, “If you want to spend all that money on transit, you go right ahead.” In a sense, they de-nationalized funding and they de-nationalized responsibility.

Head over there and read the article to see whose transit system he likes the most, and which American system he says “sucks least.” It’s an interesting read; pity Houston didn’t get a mention. Although it was interesting to see what market share the “less sucky” transit agencies have….