BS Summary: This article contains 14 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, False Dilemma, and Hasty Generalization, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 35.7% saturation with 91 hits. Analysis detected 630 faulty-reasoning hits from 255 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 74.6% and a BS Rank of 83% (3,792 of 21,886 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 82.70% of the article peer group.

Sometime in 2010 or 2011, Congress expects to decide how to spend the $250 billion or more of federal gas taxes and other highway user fees that will be collected over the next six years. 
The process of doing so is called surface transportation reauthorization. 
A major point of contention in this law is how much of our transportation system should be centrally planned and how much should be built and operated in response to the needs of actual transportation users. 
Advocates of top-down planning want to reduce per capita driving by providing disincentives to automobiles, such as increased congestion and driving costs, and funding expensive alternatives such as high-speed rail and rail transit. 
Even if you believe in the goal of reducing per capita driving, the evidence indicates that these tools have minimal effect on driving and may even be environmentally counterproductive. 
Advocates of customer-driven transportation want to fund transportation out of user fees, not taxes, and make transportation providers—whether public agencies or private parties—responsive to the needs and desires of those users. 
Decades of experience have proven that the best way of reducing the environmental costs of transportation is to use new technologies to reduce the impacts per mile of mobility, not to reduce mobility itself. 
This citizens’ guide presents the basic facts behind these two views. 
Randal O’Toole is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute and author of the forthcoming book, Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It. 
Article reasoning-pattern comparisonThis article: 11.4%null null: 9.7%The Daily Caller: 5.0%Confirmation Bias11.4%This article: 13.7%null null: 1.6%The Daily Caller: 0.7%Anchoring Bias13.7%This article: 0.0%null null: 6.4%The Daily Caller: 2.7%Availability Heuristic0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 1.5%The Daily Caller: 0.8%Representativeness Heuristic0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.1%The Daily Caller: 0.4%Hindsight Bias0.0%This article: 13.3%null null: 11.3%The Daily Caller: 3.3%Overconfidence Bias13.3%This article: 33.7%null null: 13.7%The Daily Caller: 10.4%Framing Effect33.7%This article: 0.0%null null: 3.5%The Daily Caller: 0.9%Loss Aversion0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 2.1%The Daily Caller: 0.9%Status Quo Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 1.0%The Daily Caller: 0.1%Sunk Cost Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 8.2%The Daily Caller: 2.7%Optimism Bias0.0%This article: 11.4%null null: 4.4%The Daily Caller: 2.5%Pessimism Bias11.4%This article: 0.0%null null: 8.8%The Daily Caller: 8.2%Negativity Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.0%The Daily Caller: 1.2%Self-Serving Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.5%The Daily Caller: 0.9%Fundamental Attribution Error0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.0%The Daily Caller: 0.1%Actor-Observer Bias0.0%This article: 12.9%null null: 0.6%The Daily Caller: 1.8%In-Group Bias12.9%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.1%The Daily Caller: 0.9%Out-Group Homogeneity Bias0.0%This article: 11.0%null null: 1.5%The Daily Caller: 1.6%Halo Effect11.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.0%The Daily Caller: 0.1%Horn Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.0%The Daily Caller: 0.0%Dunning-Kruger Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.7%The Daily Caller: 0.9%Recency Bias0.0%This article: 4.3%null null: 1.1%The Daily Caller: 0.6%Primacy Effect4.3%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.4%The Daily Caller: 0.2%Blind-Spot Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.6%The Daily Caller: 1.1%Ad Hominem0.0%This article: 12.9%null null: 4.0%The Daily Caller: 1.3%Straw Man12.9%This article: 35.7%null null: 5.7%The Daily Caller: 4.6%Appeal to Authority35.7%This article: 26.3%null null: 9.9%The Daily Caller: 2.9%False Dilemma26.3%This article: 0.0%null null: 5.0%The Daily Caller: 2.4%Slippery Slope0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.3%The Daily Caller: 0.2%Circular Reasoning0.0%This article: 24.7%null null: 15.2%The Daily Caller: 6.3%Hasty Generalization24.7%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.0%The Daily Caller: 0.4%Red Herring0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.4%The Daily Caller: 1.0%Bandwagon0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 2.8%The Daily Caller: 5.7%Appeal to Emotion0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 6.0%The Daily Caller: 2.1%Begging the Question0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 2.4%The Daily Caller: 3.5%Post Hoc (False Cause)0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.0%The Daily Caller: 0.1%Tu Quoque0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 2.8%The Daily Caller: 0.9%Burden of Proof0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.6%The Daily Caller: 0.2%Appeal to Nature0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.4%The Daily Caller: 0.4%Composition/Division0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 1.0%The Daily Caller: 1.5%Anecdotal0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.0%The Daily Caller: 0.0%No True Scotsman0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 3.0%The Daily Caller: 1.9%Ambiguity (Equivocation)0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.0%The Daily Caller: 0.0%Gambler’s Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.4%The Daily Caller: 0.2%Middle Ground0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.1%The Daily Caller: 0.1%Personal Incredulity0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.2%The Daily Caller: 0.2%Special Pleading0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.1%The Daily Caller: 0.1%Genetic Fallacy0.0%This article: 13.3%null null: 1.6%The Daily Caller: 2.2%Unattributed Quote13.3%This article: 0.0%null null: 2.6%The Daily Caller: 1.8%Quote-first Misdirection0.0%This article: 22.4%null null: 16.2%The Daily Caller: 8.5%Biased Writer Voice22.4%This article: 0.0%null null: 12.7%The Daily Caller: 3.6%Indoctrination0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.0%The Daily Caller: 0.3%Politically Left Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 13.7%The Daily Caller: 5.0%Politically Right Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%null null: 0.9%The Daily Caller: 1.3%Attempt to Sell a Product or S…0.0%

255 words analyzed.

Speakers

1speaker11%attributed speech227writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Writer's voice • 8 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 35 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 10 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 36 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 33 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 29 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 31 words • 0.0% coverageWriter's voice • 34 words • 100.0% coverageWriter's voice • 11 words • 0.0% coverageRandal O’Toole • 28 words • 100.0% coverage
Selected voice

Randal O’Toole

100%flagged-word coverage
28 attributed words100% of attributed speech96% writer coverage
0%50.0%100.0%Biased Writer Voice+87.2 ptsWriter: 12.8%Randal O’Toole: 100.0%100.0%Unattributed Quote-15.0 ptsWriter: 15.0%Randal O’Toole: 0.0%0.0%

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.