O'Toole is a notorious libertarian contrarian, who's built a national reputation for himself, I've met him, he's a libertarian true believer, in the extreme. As with many of his ilk, he makes some interesting points, some of which I even agree with, but more often trying to score points by ignoring the parts of the equation and/or data that don't fit the narrative he's spinning.

I saw that same "true believer" phenomena and tactic in use this week, from the Complete Streets nitwits, on the opposite fringe from O'Toole, who want to ignore, and preferably not even collect level of service data on traffic congestion metrics like travel time, volume, or speed, because it doesn't fit their narrative.

We have some folks on the left in America, that want to count how far you are from a bus stop, as somehow being an actual reduction in VMT, but not by counting or collecting actual "data" how many passengers got on the train, from the new TOD project.

And, we have folks like this on the extreme right, who prattle on about these "evil" gubmint programs like public transit, or Amtrak, based on their ideology, selectively using their preferred "factoids" as "proof" of their thesis, while scrupulously ignoring any other evidence to the contrary.

Thus, in this thesis, this author uses the fact that we do have a huge deferred capital and maintenance need for Amtrak, but ignores the fact that we also have a many orders of magnitude larger deferred capital and maintenance need for our streets, roads, freeways, bridges, traffic signal systems, and even at some of our airports.

But, as to the operating costs of Amtrak, they are covering the above the rail direct operating costs, and O'Toole might just be someone tossing out the word "lie" as his meme, to play us, with a bit of his own well known sophistry...?