It's the Brian Laira show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things.

Today it's thing number 38, 100 years of cars in New York City, for better or worse, with Nicole

Julinas, author of the new book, Movement, America's Long War to Take Back its Streets from the Car.

The book begins with the line, a century ago, the automobile changed the world and helped drive New York City

and other cities to the brink of decline. Now, listeners, it might surprise you to hear that,

as the premise of a book coming from a New York post-columnist and senior fellow at a conservative

think tank, the Manhattan Institute, is this, and she writes plenty of

conservative things. But Nicole Delinus has always been an independent thinker, not a party

line person. So let's see what she's got in this new 100-year history of New York City and the

car. Nicole, we always appreciate when you come on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Good morning, Brian. Likewise.

And we people who write for the post, we know how to write books. Absolutely. Chapter one of your

book is called New York's Original Sin, Scrapping Street Transit. What do you mean by street transit

for people who don't know that exact term?

And when and why was it scrapped?

Well, I wanted to go back into early 20th century to illustrate that we tend to blame Robert

Moses for the turn away from mass transit and the turn toward the automobile. But decades before Moses

had any power, the city was industriously going about getting rid of a sturdy part of its mass

transit infrastructure, which was the streetcars and the trolleys that had nothing to do with Robert

Moses. So in the turn of the 20th century, street cars were carrying more than a billion passengers

...