The Privatization of Roads and Highways - Ludwig von Mises Institute

76 The Privatization of Roads and Highways
stock. Private enterprise, too, would “fail” if it were prohibited
from charging a price for services rendered. 43
It is when positive use prices are allowed that businessmen
see an opportunity for profit making by curing the excess
demand, or “congestion” situations. It is here that private enterprise
shows itself head and shoulders above the bureaucratic,
statist system which operates without benefit of prices for services
rendered.
(f) Automobile banning. A solution to the congestion problem
widely beloved of some less sophisticated economists and of
many popular writers is to ban cars from crowded highways. On
the most simplistic level, the “reasoning” seems to be that since
road congestion consists of too many automobiles, the best and
surest way to end the problem is to ban the offending vehicles. 44
A slightly more cogent argument is that while automobiles usually
carry between 1.2 and 1.5 passengers per vehicle, a bus, taking
up no more than two and one-half times the highway space,
is able to carry up to fifty passengers at a time.
The problem with both views, of course, is that they treat
human beings as homogeneous units. 45 Underlying both is the
43Such prohibition would, of course, be inconsistent with a pure freemarket
system.
44Smerk, Urban Transportation, p. 198, favors the exclusion of automobiles
from highly congested areas. See also Wohl, “Must Something Be Done
About Traffic Congestion?,” p. 405. William J. Baumol, “Urban Services:
Interactions of Public and Private Decisions,” in Howard G. Schaller, ed.,
Public Expenditure Decisions in the Urban Community (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1963) justifies such extremely radical measures as “the complete
banning of privately owned passenger cars from downtown streets to
cope with the traffic problem,” on the ground that the traffic equilibrium
effect has prevented the additional building of highways from solving the
problem: “Freeways seem frequently to have turned out to be obsolete
before they were completed” (p. 15).
45See Kain, “A Re-appraisal of Metropolitan Transportation Planning,”
where he states: