END OF AN ERA

From the point of view of energetic efficiency, there is no doubt that mass transportation is far superior to a small engine pulling half a ton of steel with a single human in it. But what if that human wants to go -Where he likes -When he likes? Then mass transportation does not help him.

The optimum compromise could have been worked out by the inexorable law of supply and demand. Instead, America has now gone the way of the rest of the world: The government could not resist the temptation to spend the money collected in highway taxes on something other than highways. The highways of the countries that have gone this way are poor, and so are their mass transit systems. They did not spend their highway funds only on mass transit; they squandered them all over, for after the first step comes the second, and the hundred and second.

As long as the funds are spent on mass transit only, the precedent is, in itself, not objectionable. Neither, in itself, is a burning candle in an ammunition dump.