It's not a hard chicken/egg situation though - put money into making transit a viable alternative for these roads, then start charging for the roads when there's another option. We don't think twice about spending billions eternally digging up and reconfiguring our highways, so we could do the same to transit, for much more bang for the buck.

The main issue is that historically in the US, transit operational funding is a strictly state and below matter, but the feds are happy to stump much of the bill for highways. And states and cities generally have fewer resources.

With such a strong urban-rural political divide these days, and suburban views of transit ranging from apathetic to hostile, federal support for transit operations is unlikely. Personally, I would be a fan of devolving transport funding entirely to solve this issue.

The reason for the distinction is that federal highways are interstate. Neither New York nor San Francisco is going to be willing to pay for highways to connect the two cities, but we all benefit from being able to get from one side of the country to the other.

But arguing that states and cities have fewer resources is ridiculous. Cities have more resources than anybody -- they're where the highest income people live.

It's the rural areas that have no money, but mass transit is useless there anyway, because it's too spread out and there is no need for it there because those areas have no traffic congestion.

The cities are where mass transit works as the cities are where the money is. It's only a matter of popular will.

Cities give a lot more in federal taxes than they get, hence the "less available resources." Things like eliminating the state and local tax deduction have also hurt urban areas.

If transportation taxes were devolved to the states or the localities then there would be a lot more public transportation funding.

Cities give a lot more in federal taxes than they get, but the percentage of what they give that goes to transportation funding is negligible. >75% of the federal budget is social security, medicare/healthcare and the military, and the next biggest category after that is interest on the debt. Transportation is only ~2%, and almost half of that is things like aviation, railroads and funding for local public transit.

If you want more local money in the cities then there's a lot more to be had by e.g. raising the retirement age than by eliminating federal highway funding, which we still kind of need unless you want to stop maintaining the interstate highways.

Or if you really want to restore state fiscal control, transfer social security and medicare entirely to the states, and make the National Guard constitute more of the military.