Nationwide transit ridership in May 2018 was 3.3 percent less than in the same month of 2017.

The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) has just published a paper on the economic cost of failing to modernize transit, referring to the roughly $100 billion maintenance backlog built up by U.S. transit agencies, mostly for rail transit.

Public transit cost federal, state and local taxpayers more than $50 billion in 2016 — nearly $5 in subsidies every time someone boarded a transit vehicle.

Thanks to new services such as Uber and Lyft, the nation’s transit industry is fading away, leading some people to declare an “emergency.”

The transit industry loses billions every year and is facing declining ridership, but its supporters say that “the outlook for public transit isn’t all that bad.”

Our air traffic control system is run by the federal government and subject to all the usual bureaucratic failures such as cost overruns, lack of innovation, a stagnant workforce, unstable finances, and ineffective leadership.

For the past decade or so, Americans have been inundated with propaganda about our crumbling infrastructure. According to this narrative, our roads and bridges are falling apart and the only solution is more federal spending.

The White House released President Trump’s infrastructure plan today, which calls for spending $200 billion federal dollars as seed money to stimulate a total of $1.5 trillion on “gleaming new infrastructure.”

The Trump administration has rolled out its 2019 federal budget, which includes a plan to boost investment in the nation’s infrastructure.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is urging policymakers to pass an infrastructure package.