RALEIGH – Advocates of new transit systems in Charlotte, the Triangle and the Triad frequently trot out – or perhaps I should say chug out – an environmental justification for their efforts to squander billions of dollars building and operating their choo-choo trains.

Okay, perhaps I should use more neutral, fair-minded language here. But in my defense, transit advocates have routinely dismissed serious and substantive objections to their schemes as undeserving of consideration or even reply. My organization and others offering alternative views – often in the form of massive tomes of data and analysis – have been attacked as the transportation equivalent of the Flat-Earth Society and as shills for the petroleum, automobile, and development industries. Just a few days ago, a prominent Charlotte politician compared critics of rail transit there to extremist factions in Iraq.

So pardon me if I don’t feel like playing nice. At this point, all North Carolinians have the right to be furious at how their tax money is about to wasted on transportation systems that their own advocates admit will not appreciably alleviate traffic congestion. What’s worse, the environmental justification to which I initially referred – the idea that transit will help the state’s major urban areas improve their air quality and comply with federal regulations – is phony. Indeed, it is more likely that building and operating trail transit will worsen air pollution and thus invite more costly regulations than would otherwise be in place.

Let’s apply some common sense. If the completion of rail lines won’t significantly affect commuting patterns in Charlotte or the Triangle – again, this is stipulated to by the transit authorities themselves – then it is hard to see how air-quality improvements can follow. Second, rail interchanges and the denser land-use patterns local officials are trying to engineer at rail stops will inevitably have the effect of worsening traffic congestion in those areas, thus hiking automobile emissions due to increased idling. And third, every dollar spent on rail transit, which hinders rather than hastens the flow of auto traffic, is a dollar that can’t be spent on transportation improvements that do reduce stop-and-go traffic, such as synchronizing traffic signals and adding capacity (which often frees up traffic not on the expanded highway but on the alternative routes that used to bear the load).

Don’t take my word for it. The transit agency in Dallas concluded recently that its new light-rail line would only reduce emissions carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds by about one hundredth of a percent while actually increasing nitrogen oxide emissions by about one-tenth of a percent. Denver’s regional council of governments found something similar: a projected reduction in carbon monoxide and particulates of less than 1 percent and an increase in nitrogen oxide of 3 percent.

Nitrogen oxides interact with volatile organic compounds to produce ground-level ozone, or smog, usually on hot summer days. The Environmental Protection Agency has (wrongly) tightened the standards on ozone, throwing many areas of North Carolina potentially out of compliance even though ozone levels have mostly been declining rather than increasing in recent years (yes, even though driving, industrial production, and power generation have been rising – technology is a beautiful thing). So if anything, transit is likely to make our air-quality problems a little worse in North Carolina, not better.

Why do its proponents continue to claim otherwise? I think the explanation is a sort of quasi-religious fundamentalism, of the sort that motivates Flat-Earthers and Iraqi extremists. Fair comparison?

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.