and according to a study by randall o'toole of cato after the urban mass transportation act was signed into law transit worker productivity declined by more than fifty percent and i have here a graph that shows the number of annual transit trips per operating employee and we can see that since the sixty's declined by more than fifty percent now one reason like you said that the government entered the mass transportation industry was to bring transportation to people in these unprofitable areas so of course we would expect to see productivity to decrease but do you think that productivity loss can be attributed to any other factor. well i think there are two big factors i mean first of all as i mentioned you have the government monopolization of public transit and just as monopolies tend to do which you tend to have are higher costs and lower quality of services and then the other big factor is that under federal rules public transit agencies that run their own transit operations have to have unionized workers and again what that brings along with that are limitations on productivity as