Most mass-transit systems are incredible costly failures. One Japanese train line that was losing $4.9 million a year actually hired a cat as station master to boost ridership. The American Public Transportation Association found that 98 percent of Americans support the use of mass transit by others.

Tooele County economic development director Nicole Cline’s comment in the April 14 article “Public transportation push coming on all fronts” that more public transportation options mean less money spent on roads ignores the high cost of mass transportation services used to move a fraction of Utah traffic.

About $2 billion has been spent or is committed to being spent on TRAX and Frontrunner even though in Salt Lake City freeways are a whopping 88 percent more cost-effective, according to Owen Courreges of the Urban Futures Program at the Reason Foundation. Randy O’Toole wrote in “Rails to Nowhere: The Utah Transit Tax” that even if UTA tripled transit ridership it would still carry less than a 1.3 percent of all passenger miles in the region.

Do we in Tooele County really want to spend billions for that kind of return on investment? Cline’s assertion that “it helps keep pollution in check” is erroneous. In “The Great Rail Disaster,” O’Toole states, “Since automobiles pollute most in congested traffic, rail transit often leads to more ... air pollution. Even where [rail] can reduce air pollution, the cost is exorbitant — roughly $1 million per ton of reduced emissions, compared to $10,000 per ton for many other air-quality measures.”

Another myth Transcript-Bulletin staff writer Jamie Belnap’s piece perpetuates is that mass transit will relieve congestion. Of two dozen U.S. urban areas with rail transit, 16 have the fastest rising congestion. Ted Balaker of the Reason Public Policy Institute states that one proposed rail system in North Carolina would reduce regional congestion by about one-tenth of 1 percent. Not impressive.

Mass transit will not necessarily boost economic development either. After more than 30 years in operation, even the famous BART system has done little to spur economic activity in the Bay Area. Tooele County’s low population density and high rates of auto use make rail’s ability to generate economic gains all the more unlikely. The quote from Tooele County Commissioner Jerry Hurst in Belnap’s report supports this assertion. Rep. Jim Gowans should consider facts of cost, ineffectiveness, usage ratio comparisons and better transit alternatives instead of saying, of the light rail spur heading out to the Salt Lake International Airport, “they might as well keep coming.”

Does that mean they might as well spend billions of our tax dollars to accomplish very little? Cliff Slater, in the Honolulu Advertiser, said, “There is little evidence that rail transit projects accomplish much beyond increasing the taxes necessary to support them.”

We don’t have the population density, rail doesn’t reduce pollution, and it will likely take 50 to 80 percent of our transportation budget and be used by 1 percent of Tooele commuters.

What the Transcript-Bulletin article touts is actually the highest-priced public transportation option with the lowest potential benefits relative to costs. I like to think that out here in Tooele County we can see that the emperor has no clothes on — that is, that we’re savvy enough to build traffic systems that actually work.

Keith Smith is an environmental scientist trained in research and data analysis who lives in Grantsville.