This is the Cato Diddley Podcast for Monday, December 7th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Well, we don't have hoverboards yet, but driverless cars really aren't that far away.

At least they shouldn't be.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole,

author of the new Cato book Gridlock,

says the only things standing in the way are a whole lot of law,

some infrastructure, and a bit of innovation.

Driverless cars is actually a wonderful idea because it makes automobile driving a lot safer, it can make it faster, it can make it more energy efficient, and it can greatly relieve

congestion.

The most significant thing is about half the congestion we put up with is due to people's slow reflexes and

a computer has faster reflexes in people so when you're in the thick of traffic and the car in front of you slows down

your car will slow down exactly to meet the car in front of you. That means two things.

First a lot of the congestion that happens when these slowdowns

pulsed through a congested area is going to just go away. And second, cars

will be able to drive more closely together, which means we'll be able to fit more cars on the road.

Which means we won't have to build new highways and our existing roads can have three to four times as much capacity as they have today. So driverless cars means far less

congestion and it means safer driving. It seems like if it were to arrive any time in the next 20 years or so,

that it would come from the ingenuity of manufacturers

rather than a set of rules designed by a highway bureaucrat.

Well to some degree we've got a problem of a chicken and the egg problem.

No automobile manufacturer is going to make a driverless car because there's no highway where it's legal to drive them.

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