Libertarian Solution - 3/18/2009

[nickcoons]

http://www.libertariansolution.com/audio/show.php?id=28

There are roughly 46,000 deaths per year on our nation's government-maintained and managed roads, but government never receives blame for this and so therefore has no real incentive to do anything about it. Would a private road system put those who manage the roads in a position to make them safer and more efficient?

We discussed this issue with Dr. Walter Block on today's program, an Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher, a Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans, a Senior Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and a supporter of privatizing the nation's roads.

[heavenlyboy34]

Thank you, Nick! Walter does great work, IMHO.

[Elwar]

Too bad I can't listen at work...

I've always felt that, though this is such a low priority for most libertarians it tends to be one of the first things to come up when arguing libertarian ideals with someone (sorta like whenever someone proposes lowering taxes they always say that the first thing to be cut will be education...strange how that works).

I've read up on a few solutions just to cover all libertarian arguments. For one thing, private roads would more than likely be open access. Meaning, you can't have a private road surround someone else's property with no way for them to get out, it would work like there being an easement on the road. Also, the whole idea of competing roads not allowing other roads to cross over. The easement thing could come into play there or do like some bridges where you have several layers and you can go over (or under) roads that don't allow for an easement.

The big argument...cost, how are they paid for? The obvious solution for highways is toll roads. I drive every day 35 miles to work. I am so glad that I have a toll road that I pay $6 a day for. I was able to buy a cheaper house further away from the big city because I can drive far away with little traffic, and the roads are well maintained.

Another solution would be mileage tracking. It would end up being similar to cell phone companies charging per minute, or monthly flat fee or lower "roaming charges" etc. It would all work out based on the market.

For in town, I thought of a solution of bidding on the stop lights to pay for downtown traffic. You have a little gadget in your car that you can pay money toward getting the light to turn green for you. When the light is red it has a set time before it'll go green (say 30 seconds)...at 30 seconds your bid would have to be really high to get that light to change and as it gets closer to 1 second, the bid wouldn't have to be that high. You put in your bid while the people on the other side of the light would put in their bid to make it green for them. Every car sitting there would be bidding toward the light change so if there are 50 cars waiting with only 5 cars on the other, the 5 cars would have to fork over a lot of change to affect the light. Of course, if nobody bids, the light changes at its regular interval. If you're a corporate bigwig and you want to spend $100 - $1,000 bucks to have green lights all the way to work in the morning, you can (while funding better roads).

My favorite idea is having the roads pay for themselves just through the mere fact that all houses have one thing in common in this country...they all have a road running right up to their driveway. What better way to get cable, electric, water, Internet, phone, etc. delivered to everyone in a community than having those wires run under the roadway? You get some engineers together, you figure out a solution that can have several large pipes, cable lines, etc running about 6-10 feet under the roadways and you charge companies a cost per foot to use the lines under your roadway (you could even have multiple lines and pipes for different companies running, leading to more competition among all utilities). Imagine being able to choose another water or electric company, imagine no more lines running along poles that get broken in wind or ice storms. You can even have solar panels going over the roadways to sell to the electric companies, or to run the fiber nodes for Internet services.

The key here is, I'm just one guy thinking up how private roads could work and came up with some decent solutions. Imagine someone who's lives revolve around it figuring out solutions on a daily basis getting creative and making our daily commute so much easier.

Finally, I read one example of a bridge that goes between the US and Canada that the governments of both sides ran at a deficit each year while charging drivers on both sides. Finally it was sold to a private company and not only did that private company have a profit, while paying the governments of both sides, they lowered the toll for the drivers and made things much more efficient.

Private roads are not high on libertarians priorities, but they are possible in a libertarian world.