The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

54 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
James Wilson agrees, “[The pseudo transportation problem
is] simply the product of our natural but unrealistic desire to
move instantly to any place at any time.” 14
John Meyer tells us:
If there has been a slow but steady improvement in the performance
of urban transportation systems, why do we hear so
much discussion of a so-called “urban transportation crisis?”
The answer lies in a complex set of considerations of which
probably the most important is what might be termed “a failure
of anticipations.”
This failure of anticipations is in great part a consequence of the
uneven rates of improvement in off-peak and peak performances
of urban transport systems. Traveling across densely
populated urban areas at 50 or 60 miles an hour on a high-performance
highway during an off-peak period seems to be an
exhilarating experience, and urban commuters, quite humanly,
would like to duplicate the experience during the rush hours.
The difficulty, of course, is that too many of them wish to do so
at one time and thus it becomes impossible without a vast
increase in capacity. 15
One problem with this tack is that there is simply no evidence
to show that a set of “unrealistic expectations” has been adopted
by the public because of the relatively better conditions at offpeak
times. Rather, the argument seems to be that since traffic
moves relatively freely at off-peak hours, therefore customer dissatisfaction
with the rush hour state of affairs is due to unrealistic
wishful desires for similar unencumbered travel at all times.
(Wilson escalates even further, and claims that a desire for instantaneous
travel is at the root of the disgruntlement; needless to
14James Q. Wilson, “Urban Problems in Perspective,” in James Q. Wilson,
ed., The Metropolitan Enigma (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), p. 393.
15John Meyer, “Urban Transportation,” in The Metropolitan Enigma, James
Q. Wilson, ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 52–53.