The Progress of Liberty

I offer the twenty-third part of my response to Mr. Jetton’s critique of my essay, “How to Privatize the Roads: The Mechanisms and Benefits of Road Privatization.”

Mr. Jetton writes: “I agree that there is generally more flexibility for roads, but think comparisons should be made with care. Compare new roads with new airports and road widening with airport expansion. There is little flexibility on widening roads. I admit it wasn’t a superb analogy, but the target of my suggestion was Mr. Stolyarov’s contention that with private roads there would be unanimous approval among 1000 people, since it would be lucrative for all.”

It is fair enough to say that it is more difficult to widen existing roads than to build new ones. I think the market-based solution to this issue would be entrepreneurs’ more careful planning of the initial width of their roads. The problem with government-owned roads is that, while they  might have been even at the top of the line in terms of quality when they were first built in the 1950s or 1970s — depending on the location — they were built to accommodate the existing flow of traffic and existing economic patterns, rather than anticipating how traffic flow was likely to grow dramatically in the future. Government officials are typically fairly short-sighted, not even because of personal shortcomings, but because their actions are driven by the voters’ perceptions of pressing problems. If n cars have a difficult time getting from point X to point Y, then the politician, pressured by his constituents, will build a road from X to Y with a capacity of n cars. Neither he nor his constituents want to spend money to anticipate a situation 15 years later when there will be 3n cars traveling the same route. The politician will be out of office by then, and many of his constituents will have moved elsewhere. A private road owner, however, is likely to hold on to the same road over that time period and so is likely to make it wide enough to begin with so that all of his customers can travel on it safely and conveniently.

So, while it is more difficult to get nearby owners’ consent for a road widening, this situation will not occur with nearly the same frequency under a free market, because roads will tend to be built to be wide enough to begin with. And if they happen not to be, then the road owner will still be able to comfortably widen most of the road, and if some of the nearby landowners hold out, it may be possible to buy them out over time, or wait until the land changes ownership, or negotiate a contract with them whereby they permit the road widening in exchange for receiving a fraction of revenues from the road.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

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