The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

48 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
gasoline supplies, while the society at large calls in vain for oil
and gas conservation.
Nor is congestion a phenomenon limited to the process of
getting to and from work. In many large cities, practically anything
out of the ordinary is sufficient to trigger it: the letting out
of the opera, a movie, or a ball game; the attempt to go to or
return from the beach, the golf course or shopping.
Traffic congestion reaches into all aspects of living: working,
shopping, recreation, etc. It insidiously cripples the ability of people
to coordinate activities with one another, as it becomes virtually
impossible to make exact appointments—a broad interval of
time is usually the best that can be planned on.
One superficial indication of the gravity of the situation is the
dramatic language used to describe it in otherwise sober and
unemotional scholarly works. A.A. Walters, for example, in an
authoritative mathematical and analytical tome, is moved to
characterize “the congestion of towns and cities” as no less than
“the plague of the century.” 1
The judiciary has taken official note of “the generally obnoxious
(traffic clogged) situation in midtown and lower Manhattan”
by allowing chauffeur-driven limousines business-tax
deductions. U.S. Tax Court Judge Theodore Tanenwald
explained: “[These expenditures] were ordinary and necessary.” 2
To put a numerical perspective on the problem, there were
3,815,807 miles of highway in operation in the U.S. in 1974, the
last year for which figures are available. Of these, 3,178,152, or 83
percent, were classified as rural, 3 and only 637,655, or 17 percent,
as urban. And yet of the 1,289.6 billion miles of motor vehicle
1A.A. Walters, The Economics of Road User Charges, International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development, Staff Occasional Paper #5 (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 2.
2New York Post, 19 January 1978, p. 3.
3U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1976
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), table 979.