I realize that I should write more descriptive titles, but I’m a great admirer of Lisa Margonelli, a truly creative thinker on mobility — the upward kind and the geographical kind. Though Margonelli is center-left and more inclined to support state interventions than I am, she’s open-minded and often surprising, e.g.,

Usually, when we talk about addressing big problems like oil dependence, climate change and stagnant wages, we talk about big fixes: high speed rail, electric cars, and climate change bills for the former; federally funded business loans or education programs for the latter. We don’t talk about little, personal things like auto loans. But we should: The auto’s all-consuming role in American life gives it extraordinary leverage in both the economy and the environment.

And so Margonelli talks up an innovative non-profit in New Hampshire, More Than Wheels, which is helping a lot of poor and working class people achieve their economic goals more effectively and at lower cost than, say, people fighting more smooth TGV-live trains that will carry upper-middle-class people from one central business district to another.

As most of you know, I’m a believer in transit and encouraging density in America’s most productive regions. Yet as the authors of Reinventing the Automobile suggest, well-designed personal mobility platforms (e.g., car-sharing platforms, electricity-generation systems that leverage cars as storage, performance parking, etc.) might be a better way of meeting our various economic and environmental needs than a nostalgic program centered on somehow reversing the forces that have led to the rise of polycentric cities.

So yes, Lisa Margonelli is awesome. That’s one takeaway. Another is that the most obvious or familiar solution to a problem isn’t always the right one: can we achieve the same objective for less money, and/or in a way that better meets the desires of consumers or the ostensible beneficiaries of our efforts to help others? Yet another is that those of us with a built-in bias towards freedom need allies, and it helps to be willing to make single-issue coalitions.