The Progress of Liberty

I offer the twenty-ninth 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: “In post 109 I said Mr. Stolyarov’s analogy between private and public apartments versus private and public roads was weak. He modifies one side of his analogy — shrinking it to low-income private and low-income public apartments. That does not strengthen the analogy. The correspondence between source (apartments) and target (roads) remains weak. The vehicles that contribute the most to road deterioration — 18-wheelers — aren’t analogous to low-income renters of public housing. They use the same roads (where permitted) as other vehicles. Also, they are the high rent payors, since they pay more in fuel taxes, motor vehicle taxes, and tolls to use the roads.”

Every analogy breaks down to some extent, because no two aspects of reality compared are exactly identical. But I would like to remind Mr. Jetton and our readers that it was Mr. Jetton who began to develop this analogy by rather roughly comparing the divergent qualities of private apartments to the divergent qualities of private roads. I continued by refining the analogy, comparing private services to government services in each realm.

However, to make the analogy still more accurate, I would venture to argue that fully private roads would experience less deterioration due to 18-wheelers than government roads do today. Granted, 18-wheelers and low-income renters are perhaps not perfectly comparable, but I still think it is fair to claim that road deterioration due to 18-wheelers will be less under a private system than it is a under a government system, to a degree similar to that in which private apartments for low-income renters are better kept than government housing projects for low-income individuals.

Private road owners could address the 18-wheeler problem in many more creative ways than government officials can even imagine. For instance, private owners have full discretion over whom they allow on the road and what kinds of rules of the road they set up. A road owner could build a special lane just for the 18-wheelers, and this lane could be particularly reinforced to compensate for the added expected wear on it. Or special separate roads could emerge just for smaller vehicles and just for 18-wheelers – which would be safer for the drivers of smaller cars in any case, while perhaps facilitating faster commerce. Drivers of 18-wheelers tend to be more careful and more experienced (after all, their jobs and cargos are on the line). Thus, they can be permitted to go faster than, say, 70 miles per hour, when only 18-wheelers are on the road. The greatest danger that faster 18-wheelers pose is to smaller cars whose drivers are typically less experienced and incapable of going along with the faster traffic flow that a prevalence of fast 18-wheelers would generate.

This is just a possibility, but it is one way in which private markets might reduce road deterioration due to 18-wheelers.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

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