Because transit in America has been neglected for so long, it’s a common misconception that transit is always inconvenient or slower than driving. In reality, driving is only more convenient because, the US spends $206,000,000,000 each year to make driving more convenient. Transit, by comparison, gets less than a third as much funding, even while having a $176 billion investment backlog.

In fact, in a phenomenon termed “highway robbery”, state DOTs often falsify and manipulate traffic forecasts to justify highway expansions and spending money on roads. Using “junk” “pseudoscience”, traffic engineers spread fear of congestion

Governments lie to justify roads instead of transit

nightmare to scare taxpayers into paying for needlessly expensive and wasteful infrastructure, even though such “traffic modeling violates professional standards and federal rules”.

For a famously contentious highway bridge expansion in Portland, OR, an independent audit found that “[w]idening the bridge would do nothing to improve I-5 congestion and could make it worse,” that the DOT used “invalid traffic forecast metrics” which “rely directly on exaggerated forecasts from the regional model [translating] into unrealistic travel speed and travel time estimates, i.e. ‘garbage in – garbage out’”, and that “[t]ransit investments could help address I-5 congestion” but the DOT’s failure to realistically evaluate transit would result in “hyper-congestion”.

In effect, state DOTs manipulate traffic forecasts to justify building a larger fiefdom of state-owned land, and downplay alternatives that would threaten their dominance. Americans often think that driving is the best option, and that’s true, but only because reliable, high-quality alternatives have not been built and not because driving is a superior mode of travel.