The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Homesteading City Streets:
An Exercise in Managerial Theory 243
serve as only the most indirect of evidence for use of any specific
street.
Under these conditions, the most accurate assessment might
well be derived through proxy. That is, we can assume that all
residents of Manhattan use its streets to a certain, specific degree,
call it X, and those in the surrounding areas to a lesser degree,
say, X/3. Or, as a rough approximation, that all of the inhabitants
of the entire city (or each of the residents of all five boroughs) are
the legitimate owners of all of their respective streets.
Based on these considerations, we are faced with two, very
different implications, and thus two, very different ways of distributing
the thoroughfares to the people. On the one hand, the
owners of the property alongside the road own it; on the other,
all members of the society own one quotal share each.
But we have only begun to encounter complications. Another
one concerns how the properties shall be divided up on the basis
of either of these criteria. To wit, consider one long street in Manhattan,
e.g., Broadway, which runs the entire length of the island.
Suppose there are 10,000 separate properties that abut this
avenue. Do each of these 10,000 property owners assume control
over 1/10,000 of the entire facility? Or do they each own that little
bit of it that touches upon their property? (In this case, every
real estate holder would own exactly half of Broadway affronting
his property, and the other half would be given to the owner
across the street.)
The latter option is clearly infeasible. With 10,000 separate
owners of Broadway, this avenue would quickly become impassible
to traffic. Each individual, particularly if he could get the
cooperation of the man across the street, would be able to bring
motorists to a standstill. Streets would come to resemble a
Parcheesi board, and blockades could become the order of the day.
This option must be rejected, but not only because of its
undoubted impracticality. Fortunately, for our underlying homesteading
theory, roads could never have been built in the first place
in any such manner, for the same reason: initial susceptibility to