The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

viii The Privatization of Roads and Highways
Our time is worth a few pennies to us. Cirrus and Pulse
would charge us, wild guess, three dollars a month or less to provide
magnetically encoded stickers for our cars. Machines scattered
about the roads, or sensors under the pavement, would
record our comings and goings. That information would go to
Cirrus and Pulse, and from them to our road providers. We might
get three or four monthly bills, or just one, depending on the
wherewithal of road owners. Some road owners, out in the
woods, would still have toll booths, which would work perfectly
well—less traffic and a slower pace of life make it no big deal. I
use a toll booth occasionally in Atlanta, and the delay is only a
few seconds.
Lest you think your money would be going up in exhaust
fumes, remember that market firms, who must please customers
to stay in business, provide everything better and less expensively
than government, without that nasty moral hangover of
forcing people to pay for things they may not use or want. Your
gasoline price already includes forty to fifty cents per gallon in
taxes for road building and maintenance. This means I’m paying
twenty-five to thirty-three dollars per month for road use now.
With privatization of roads, that cost would go down, probably
considerably. It happens every time anything is moved from government
hands into private hands.
There are other benefits that would follow road privatization.
The private roads that exist now have fewer accidents than public
roads, probably in part because they’re better maintained: If
private road builders let potholes remain, get reputations for
high accident rates, or do repairs during rush hour, they have to
deal with complaints and with people choosing other roads.
Pollution and pollution controls on automobiles would also
be handled by road privatization. If auto pollution were to grow
too thick, people living near the offending roads would sue the
biggest, most obvious target: the road owners. Road owners
would therefore charge higher fees for cars without up-to-date
inspection stickers. Auto manufacturers would build pollutioncontrol
equipment into cars, and advertise how cleanly they run.