Reporter Yamil Berard scoured through thousands of pages of court records, documents from the National Transportation Safety Board, and videos of that tragic day in February 2021 when 130 cars, trucks and semis piled up along a stretch of the North Tarrant Express. Early morning commuters, unaware of the black ice beneath them, crashed one after another along two lanes bound by concrete barriers on both sides. The horrific scene spanned the length of three football fields.
I actually read a book by a noted libertarian economist making the case for privatizing all roads (its easier to tear down a stupid argument if you start by taking it seriously).
What I expected was, y’know, just a bad argument. Like, there would be a bunch of super positive assumptions about how a bunch of stuff would work out that just don’t work in reality, that sort of thing.
What I got was quadruple decker raised glass highways with holes cut into them for rain to fall through.
No, you did not hallucinate that sentence.
That is the libertarian answer to how you solve the problems with privatizing all roads. Every road, even those in cities (especially cities) is actually four or five competing roads stacked on top of each other, owned by different companies, made of perfectly transparent glass so as not to deprive anyone living below them of their God given access to sunlight, and full of holes so as not to deprive anyone of their God given right to rain.
The author comes to this conclusion after realizing “Oh shit my libertarian homesteading fantasy doesn’t work if Jeff Bezos can just build a highway over your property, but my private roads fantasy doesn’t work if Jeff Bezos can just buy up a thin strip of land all the way around LA and then charge people a thousand dollars to cross it.”
The best argument to toll every Interstate quality highway is that the toll revenue acts as a pretty good use tax. It is the reason why most toll highways are in better condition than free ones.
And figuring out how to fund free highways in the future is going to be a lot harder when the number of gas vehicles goes down and the gas tax, a pseudo use tax, isn’t enough to fund maintenance.
And empty. At least in my drives, they are far less traveled.
It depends on where. There are some toll highways that are 12+ lanes wide.
This is the core problem. If you want a use tax for driving, attach it to vehicle ownership (Canada does this with plate stickers, for example). If you make it specific to which roads people drive you just end up with fast roads for some and slow roads for everyone else, and a whole lot of under-utilized infrastructure capacity.