The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

234 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
two or three options. In very sharp contrast, the “dollar vote”
occurs every day, and can be focused in great detail upon choices
at the micro level; it can distinguish between flavors of ice cream
and colors of shirts. It can also reward and penalize individual
street owners, tending to guarantee better performance on their
part.
INTRODUCTION
This chapter is dedicated to an exploration of how city streets
can best be privatized. Among the alternatives: giving them
away or selling them to specific people (e.g., those who live on
them, work on them, or travel through them) or auctioning them
off to the highest bidder(s). Further, they could be disposed of
piecemeal, e.g., in sections of one hundred feet or so, or in their
entirety, e.g., Broadway in Manhattan goes to one firm, or, alternatively,
they might be packaged in neighborhood sections, for
example, all the streets in Greenwich Village end up under the
control of a single commercial entity, all those in the Upper East
Side to another. (I use examples from New York City since this is
perhaps the most well-known locale in the world.)
To most scholars, this exploration will appear as ludicrous,
idiosyncratic or even maniacal. Privatize the streets? “Which
controlled substance is a person laboring under the influence of,
who would even raise such an issue, let alone attempt to soberly
address it?,” will be the likely reaction of most urban economists.
Nevertheless, we persist in our folly. (This is meant sarcastically.
I make no apology whatsoever for attempting to apply
what we have learned about the best way to supply cars and
chalk and cheese and computers namely, free enterprise—to an
analogous good, roadways.) We will not here make the case for
private rather than public enterprise in general. There is already
a rather large extant literature on privatization. 1 It makes the
1 Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, eds. The Privatization Process: A
Worldwide Perspective (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
1996); Barnett (1980); Bruce L Benson, To Serve and Protect: Privatization and