This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 17th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown. Urban

planners of many stripes want to make mobility more expensive. But why? The romanticized

plans for walkable neighborhoods and dense urban settings are notions

from a past that largely only existed for the very wealthy.

Mobility, says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole has value independent of any

central planner's dreams. His new book gridlock is available at Cato Store

dot org. The Secretary of Transportation, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the Director of the Environmental Protection Agency have signed an agreement to require

Metropolitan Areas to limit mobility of the people in those metropolitan areas.

They're going to require them to write plans that aim to reduce the amount of driving we do.

Now what people don't think about much

it because we take it for granted is that the automobile has provided us with a

tremendous amount of personal mobility that we didn't have before the automobile.

A lot of people like to imagine some kind of a golden age where we all rode around on trains

or bicycles or streetcars, but the reality is only the wealthy could do that.

And the wealthy didn't do all that much of it.

The average American only traveled in 1900,

about 200 miles a year by intercity train and another two or

300 miles a year by streetcar. And today we're traveling 18,000 miles per

person per year, almost all of it by automobile or airplane.

So the idea that we can go back to some kind of age when we can just have intercity high-speed trains and streetcars is

foolish, it's not going to work. Mobility has given us a tremendous amount of

benefits. For one thing, it gives employers access to far more workers.

...