The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Free-Market Transportation: Denationalizing the Roads 35
resources) and move to capture the difference for themselves
through their entrepreneurial buying and selling. Competition,
in this process, consists of perceiving possibilities of offering
opportunities to other market participants which are more
attractive than those currently being made available. It is an
essentially rivalrous process . . . (which) . . . consists not so
much in the regards decision-makers have for the likely future
reactions of their competitors as in their awareness that in making
their present decisions they themselves are in a position to
do better for the market than their rivals are prepared to do; it
consists not of market participants’ reacting passively to given
conditions, but of their actively grasping profit opportunities
by positively changing the existing conditions. 24
It is this competitive market process that can apply to the road
industry. Highway entrepreneurs can continually seek newer
and better ways of providing services to their customers. There is
no reason why street corporations should not actively compete
with other such firms for the continued and increased tolls of
their patrons. There may not be millions of buyers and sellers of
road transport service at each and every conceivable location
(nor is there for any industry) but this does not preclude vigorous
rivalry among the market participants, however many.
How might this work?
Let us consider, for the sake of simplicity, a town laid out into
sixty-four blocks, as in a checker board (see figure 3). We can conveniently
label the north-south or vertical avenues A through I,
and the east-west or horizontal streets 1st through 9th. If a person
wants to travel from the junction of First Street and Avenue
A to Ninth Street and Avenue I, there are several paths he may
take. He might go east along First Street to Avenue I, and then
north along Avenue I, to Ninth Street, a horizontal and then a
vertical trip. Or he may first go north to Ninth Street, and then
east along Ninth Street to Avenue I. Alternatively, he may follow
24 Kirzner, Competition and Entrepreneurship, pp. 122–23.