The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Congestion and Road Pricing 49
travel which took place in 1974, only 583.5 billion, or 45 percent,
utilized the rural roads, while fully 706.1 billion travel-miles, or
55 percent, were crammed onto urban highways. 4 In other
words, the rural 45 percent of the traffic enjoyed the use of a full
83 percent of the total road capacity while the urban 55 percent
had to content itself with a mere 17 percent.
Yet the problem is even worse than these figures would indicate,
for the following reasons:
1. The classification of “urban roads” is itself divided into
“Urban Arterial Streets,” which comprise about 12 percent of
the total, and “Other Urban Streets,” which encompass 88
percent. 5 Although 60 percent of vehicular miles of travel
occur on the larger (88 percent) subdivision, a hefty 40 percent
of the traffic takes place on the cramped (12 percent)
Urban Arterial Streets.
2. Use of the roads is not uniform throughout the day, or the
week. Rather, it is concentrated by work patterns, into weekday
mornings and evenings, and by recreation, into weekend
times that vary with the season. Termed the “peak load”
problem, this is widely held to be responsible for road congestion.
James M. Buchanan, for example, writes: “It should
never be forgotten that the highway problem is essentially
one of peak load. There is little traffic congestion, even in
Manhattan, at three in the morning.” 6
4Ibid., table 986.
5George A. Smerk, Urban Transportation: The Federal Role (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1965), pp. 59–61.
6James M. Buchanan, “The Pricing of Highway Services,” National Tax
Journal 5, no. 2 (June 1952): 106. See also Wilfred Owen, The Metropolitan
Transportation Problem (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1956), pp.
80–85; G.J. Ponsonby, “The Problem of the Peak, with Special Reference to
Road Passenger Transport,” The Economic Journal (March 1958): 74; John W.
Dyckman, “Transportation in Cities,” in Arthur F. Schreiber, Paul K. Gatons,
and Richard B. Clemmer, eds., Economics of Urban Problems (Boston: