The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Comment on “Roads, Bridges, Sunlight, and Private Property” 313
don’t let the government have any power. The Blocks are like the
rest of them in that, for some obscure reason, they think that the
courts are not part of the government. They have the courts making
the decisions of how far up or how far down ownership
extends. Why the court is more qualified than the legislature is
not obvious. Both frequently make bad errors.
So much for this important but easy problem, the fact that if
you had private and total ownership of roads, it would be possible
to purchase all the houses around a given plot of land, let us
say the roughly one square mile upon which my house and several
hundred other houses stand. Then by charging for crossing
your property you could collect the full rental value of the
enclosed land.
Incidentally, the Blocks seem to think that I believe that owners
of the roads would prohibit people from crossing rather than
charge them a toll. Since I have admitted that I do not remember
the conversation in detail, it is possible that I said something
which could be so interpreted. If so I regret it.
Let me now turn to another problem with respect to private
roads which I think is equally important but harder to solve. I do
not know a solution, but I have no proof that none exists. I normally
challenge proponents of private roads to draw a road map
in which competitive roads are shown. This is quite feasible with
superhighways. Indeed, at the moment some people are building
such private roads in the United States. With these roads it may
well be that economies of scale will make competition impossible,
but there is no way of telling until we have some more experimentation.
For superhighways we can’t say that private ownership
is not feasible until we have at least ten years of experience.
On the minor roads the matter is different. To repeat, I have
not proved that you cannot have competing road nets, but none
of the people who are in favor of it have ever met my challenge
to produce a set of competing road nets on a map. I would not
like the only road from my house to be owned by a monopolistic
income maximizer.