Exiting the Highway to Hell (UPDATED)

I generally enjoy Megan McArdle's commentary and find myself in agreement with her far more often than not, but this post is just, well, ignorant:

The massive subsidy provided to drivers in the form of free roads is obviously producing highly inefficient outcomes, which is why DC feels like a prison from which it is impossible to escape unless one wants to spend four hours on the Beltway. We clearly need to institute comprehensive road tolls combined with a congestion pricing scheme. Plus, of course, a carbon tax to compensate for the negative externalities drivers are imposing on those of us who use primarily mass transit.

Here's a table comparing dollars of government subsidy per 1000 passenger miles for different modes of transportation. Unfortunately it only goes to 2002, but I doubt much has changed since then.

Although government does subsidize auto use with road construction, these subsidies are offset by vehicle and fuel taxes paid by drivers. In fact you'll notice in the linked table that for most automotive modes, the government subsidy is actually negative because of these offsets, whereas transit subsidies are over a hundred dollars per thousand passenger miles since at least 1990. In 2002 it comes out to fifteen to twenty cents per passenger mile. It's clear that when Megan speaks of "massive subsidy provided to drivers" she is obviously either making her own false presumption or simply repeating a line from the leftist eco-narrative on transportation.

A real solution would entail:

1. Designing road systems to move traffic. For example, it's the year of Our Lord 2007; is there any sane reason that every traffic light in America isn't synchronized? This is especially important for the environment as a car moving at 45mph down the freeway creates a tiny fraction of the pollution that a car idling in traffic does, and of course for less time over the same distance.

2. Legalize transit. Most metro areas have gobs of laws outlawing or monopolizing various forms of transit, from prohibiting private buses and jitneys to creating sovietized taxi regimes. These barriers not only need to be removed, they need to be replaced with a generic infrastructure framework such as a system of transit stops and rights of way that competing private transit companies can use to provide orderly systems. This also means deregulating fares and allowing transit providers to charge what the market will bear. All other deregulation can't work if price controls on all forms of transit aren't eliminated.

3. Throughout most of the metro areas in the country, home offices are actually illegal to some degree or another through various zoning restrictions. We need to reverse this, and remove local legal barriers to private telecommunications development and deployment.

4. Convert general toll roads and existing HOV lanes into free roads with High Occupancy/Toll lanes. Control traffic on HOT lanes using variable tolls.

5. And finally, after a few years of reform, sell off most public transit systems, bus by bus if necessary. The chart linked above says it all. Maybe someone facing marketplace imperatives and competition can figure out a way to run these systems efficiently.

UPDATE: Cool! Megan responds. And I riposte in her comments...