While the Bush administration aims to cut gasoline use by focusing on more ethanol and making cars more fuel efficient, it’s totally missing the train when it comes to public transportation. That’s the conclusion of an upcoming report by the U.S. federation of Public Interest Research Groups, or PIRG. PIRG argues in its report, “A Better Way to Go,” to be released Thursday, that the federal government should be pouring more cash into mass transit rather than preserving America’s car culture.

Public transportation saved about 3.4 billion gallons of gasoline and cut global warming emissions by about 26 million tons in 2006, according to the report. Of course, that’s a drop in the bucket when you consider the 1.9 billion total tons the U.S. emits, measured by Energy Department data.

But instead of boosting spending on public transit, the last Bush budget proposes channeling $3.2 billion in transit money to fund highways, PIRG complains in a press release.

“We’ve got everything from worsening oil dependency and urban traffic congestion to rising gas prices and a booming demand for public transit,” said John Krieger, a transportation advocate at the group. “Moving in the wrong direction is tremendously irresponsible.”

Part of the difficulty in developing more public transit is that the U.S. has greater distances and a more dispersed population than many places where public transportation has broader acceptance, such as Europe; high-speed trains are an easier sell when it’s a five-hour trip coast-to-coast. And cars offer a degree of individual mobility even the swankiest metro can’t match.

But the deeper problem, says PIRG, is that the nation has no clear goal of what its transportation system should achieve. As a result, says Phineas Baxandall, one of the report’s authors, the Transportation Bill has become “synonymous with pet-project spending, exactly what it shouldn’t be.” Under current rules, it’s easier to get money for highways than for public transit.

Increasingly, people are voting with their feet. Gasoline demand is falling like it hasn’t for 16 years. Ridership of public busses, subways, and commuter trains rose 30% between 1995 and 2006, PIRG says. That’s almost twice as fast as the overall rate of population growth, according to U.S. Census data.

(Por Ana Campoy, The Wall Street Journal, 04/03/2008)