This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 26, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Department of Transportation again wants to entangle itself further into how you get to work,

how you live, and how livable your community is.

What does livability even mean?

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole, author of the new book Gridlock, says livability should mean you living where

you want within the means that you have.

Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, announced that they were going to make livability a criteria for giving out federal grants

for transportation and especially transit.

And this has two implications.

First of all, he was repealing criteria

that had been established under the Bush administration

that transit had to be cost efficient.

In other words, if you want to build a street car near

downtown and get federal funds for it, you had to show that that street car was more cost efficient

than buses. Well, everybody knows that buses are more cost efficient than

streetcars.

So when the Bush administration announced that rule,

all the cities that had 80 different cities have been planning to build streetcars.

They immediately scrapped their plans or shelved their plans and said,

well, we'll wait till there's a more friendly administration

to come along.

...