The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

52 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
trade which are engendered by close proximity. But surely discoordinative
congestion could be abolished without affecting density
in the slightest.
With regard to Times Square on New Year’s Eve: some people
attend the festivities to enjoy the congestion; they enjoy bumping
into people, being detained in their progress in any direction, and
being elbowed, shoved, and even stomped on. But others find the
congestion unsatisfactory, although they may desire to live in an
area of high density.
Banfield poses an extreme rendition of the “no problem”
view:
If these inner districts . . . usually adjacent to the central business
district and spreading out from it [that are characterized
by extremely poor and minority groups] . . . which probably
comprise somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the
total area classified as urban by the Census, were suddenly to disappear,
along with the people who live in them, there would be no serious
urban problems worth talking about. If what really matters is
the essential welfare of individuals and the good health of the
society as opposed to comfort, convenience, amenity, and business
advantage, then what we have is not an “urban problem”
but an “inner-central-city-and-larger-older-suburb” one. 11
One cannot but agree that many of our urban problems are
intimately connected with the minority groups and the “poverty
lifestyle” that are characteristic of our large urban inner cities, yet
surely not all problems would be solved with the disappearance
of this sector of the city. The destruction of human life on our
highways, the serious congestion problems, and the mismanagement
by the road authorities would survive the evaporation of
the inner cities, because these problems are completely unrelated
to the inner city. 12 No amount of sophistry, moreover, can convert
11Ibid., p. 12; emphasis added.
12This is not to mention the deterioration of non-inner city housing due to
rent controls, the unemployment of non-inner city youth due to minimum