The Washington Examiner reports:

Six of [the Washington-area mass transit system] Metro’s top executives are assigned agency-owned vehicles that they can drive home, the transit system acknowledged Tuesday, one day after saying none of them had take-home vehicles.

That is in addition to the 116 Metro employees who receive take-home vehicles, including 88 managers and superintendents, first reported by The Washington Examiner.

I wonder if executives and managers at automobile companies get free subway passes?

The Perks of Local Government is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A new report says that traffic congestion is worse, and the American Public Transportation Association urges Congress to . . . spend more money on public transportation.

Cato senior fellow Randal O’Toole has been challenging the received wisdom on traffic and mass transit for years. See his book Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It, and lots of other studies. In November he debated the head of the American Public Transportation Association at a Cato Policy Forum:

The Traffic Congestion Problem is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In 2006, the National Transportation Safety Board found that 298 subway cars in the Washington Metrorail system are “vulnerable to catastrophic telescoping damage” and should be replaced or reinforced immediately. They weren’t, which was a major reason why nine people died in a rail collision last June.

In 2007, supposedly fail-safe circuits in Metrorail’s train detection and control system began to “intermittently malfunction.” This contributed to at least one near miss before the fatal crash, and was the other major reason why nine people died in June.

Clearly, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority is short of funds. It still has not begun to replace the 298 cars; instead, it is merely inserting them into the middle of trains so that, in the event of a crash, the will be buffered by newer (and hopefully stronger) cars.

According to the Federal Transit Administration, it will cost nearly $50 billion to bring rail lines in Washington and five other urban areas — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco — up to a “state of good repair.” Current rates of spending are not even adequate to keep these systems in the miserable condition they are in today. As an official with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority says with resignation, “there will never be enough money” to restore New York’s rail system to a state of good repair (see p. 15).

The problem, of course, is that rail transit does not come close to paying for itself out of transit fares. Fares cover about 60 percent of the cost of operating Washington’s Metrorail system, but none of the costs of building or maintaining it — and has one of the highest cost recovery ratios in the industry. Transit agencies have convinced most legislators that transit shouldn’t have to pay for itself — but that leaves them perennially short of funds and their patrons in danger of deadly accidents.

Legislators love to fund “ribbons, not brooms” — that is, new, highly visible projects such as the $5.2 billion silver line to Dulles Airport rather than the cost of maintaining the existing system.

So what’s the solution? How about federal regulation of transit agencies? That won’t solve any of the problems, but at least we’ll have a whole new layer of bureaucracy to blame the next time people are killed in a train crash.

The real solution is to stop building expensive rail transit lines that cities can’t afford to maintain. Transit should be privatized, which will lead transit companies to run vehicles — mostly buses — where people want to go, not where bureaucrats and politicians decide they ought to go.

Short of Funds? Give the Feds More Power is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Why America leads the world in medical innovation.

• If the health care overhaul bill were a medical product it would have to come with a warning label, which could read something like this: Warning: This product will increase your health insurance premiums, make your children poorer and won’t make you healthier. That’s not all. There’s more.

• Unintended Consequences: Could government efforts to redesign cities to make them more pedestrian friendly, concentrate jobs in selected areas, and increase mass transit actually raise C02 emission levels?

• What does it say about politicians who think Americans who don’t buy health insurance should be subject to a $250,000 fine and/or five years in jail?

• The president is on his first official trip to Asia. Here’s an outline as to how the United States should engage the region.

• Podcast: “Obama’s Credibility on the Dollar“

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog