When it comes to roads, the key issue is the total freedom of movement! if there are no alternatives to private roads, those roads become not only a monopoly but a form of oppression and abuse! And that’s not going to last!

As road users we want to get where we are going comfortably, safe, and in the least amount of time possible, the state however cares for none of that. The state is interested in power and money. The road system therefore is managed to extract as much money out of the people as possible while aiming to make travel a privilege that is granted by the state. If we travel by road we become subject to whim’s of the government’s enforcers, a target of their theft or worse.

What cemented that view in my mind is the red light camera. 30+ years ago traffic engineers could solve red light running with longer yellow signal times. Today, governments shorten the yellow signal or look for lights that have sub-standard yellow signal length and install RLCs to rake in the cash. Intentionally safety negative actions to steal from us. They even went so far as to change the MUTCD and ITE guidelines for shorter yellow signals to cover their tracks.

Safety, fighting congestion, and so merely offer excuses for the latest scheme to steal from us with traffic tickets, taxes, or road building contracts for the politically connected.

Back in the olden days roads were funded by subscription, returns were not great but yet people continued to invest in them. The reason was the road was a way to get people to your town and to get your products out.

So at a minimum that will be a reason for people to invest.

I think Greg does make a point about quality, I would expect any given company to want to spend the least they could, however if they are liable if you are injured while using their road to due a defect of the road it won’t take but a few lost lawsuits for road companies to decide to spend a little more to have a good road now rather than spend less and a bad case later.

There is one point that buzzes about my head when it comes to private roads and it is the fact that we almost all drive on at least one everyday.

Parking lots are a type of road are they not? And parking lots….suck. I’m talking about the death-ground that is in between a variety of buildings not parking structures which are better, because they are set off to one side and usually have only one entrance and exit.

The only good lot I can recall was at Disneyland. They kept a tight rein on that and did a great job of keeping everything orderly.

The average parking lot has no effective controls can be entered from numerous points, has some blind spots, suffers from poor flow-through and is the one place where cars and pedestrians use the same space. There isn’t one in my town that I would call well designed.

While I do know that private roads are the desirable option and can be done let’s have an informal agreement to not let parking lot designers be involved in creating the new private road system.

Read about James J. Hill and his Great Northern, a transcontinental railroad built without public financing.

In a remotely just society, no one.

Do you have the power to force your neighbor, at the point of a gun, to sell you his land? You may try to justify such a thing on the grounds that you are paying him for the land you stole, but part of the concept of owning something means you don’t have to sell it of you don’t want to, at any price.

If you can’t do that to your neighbor, then you can’t delegate the power to do it to someone else. You can’t authorize an agent to do something for you that you were not first authorized to do yourself.

Even if private industry financing a portion of a highway or some road construction, the majority of the bill will be from the state. I do not think this is right but that is the state of where we are at in this country.

“Revenue would come from tolls and user fees either directly from vehicle owneers or through gasoline sales. The highway owners would have to charge enough to pay for construction, maintenance and profit, but the state has to collect taxes to cover the same as well as the enormous amount of waste it causes. I’m confident the profit would be much smaller than the waste. Of course, the highway owners would have to keep prices low enough that people won’t switch to other forms of transportation, such as rail and flight, or take alternate routes over a competitor’s highways.”

There are many roads in NJ that are financed by the state and still have taxes and tolls, this double dipping only hurts the consumer in the end and if private financing happens it may not be localized in jersey and a few states but all states; where states will tax for highway repairs on top of tolls provided by private industry.

As for the comment on “Old Testament style idolotry” is a little far fetched but the reliance on the government in the sense of road and construction has been with us since Roman times. It will never change, sadly indeed.

If I remember correctly, the chunnel was financed privately. The investors eventually went bankrupt, but not until after they finished it. Projects much larger than highways are financed regularly. You can sell stock and bonds directly to the public or large institutions. Revenue would come from tolls and user fees either directly from vehicle owneers or through gasoline sales. The highway owners would have to charge enough to pay for construction, maintenance and profit, but the state has to collect taxes to cover the same as well as the enormous amount of waste it causes. I’m confident the profit would be much smaller than the waste. Of course, the highway owners would have to keep prices low enough that people won’t switch to other forms of transportation, such as rail and flight, or take alternate routes over a competitor’s highways.

I agree with you that it won’t happen in the US, at least not in the near future, but not because it’s not feasible or not better, but because of state worship. The American people are guilty of Old Testament style idolotry.

As far as the defense issue, you’re right that Eisenhower built the interstate system as his vision of national defense. That doesn’t mean that private highways could not have been built and the state pay a fee to maintain the capacity the military needs. Besides, is that strategy really needed in the nuclear/missile age? Eisenhower was fighting WWII all over again when he built the highway system.

I can tell you that I work for one of the largest if not the largest engineering firm in the country rated by ENR. We have many road projects, spanning different states across the US.

Private industry such as engineering, architectural, and construction companies do not have the resources to build and maintain roads. In fact, if you look at the general profit of these EAC companies like mine, the profit margin is relatively small compared to other industries.

So for the most part, whoever finances the engineering and construction project has to do so at a premium price because of cost attributed to hiring a construction agency and engineering company, such as overhead, insurance ect…

We now have to analyze who has the capital to finance these companies and most likely it will be the banking industry. Now having family who work as investment bankers (ibanking) at large firms and hedge funds; there is a typical profit margin that they normally try to attain.

Even, with competition would building a multi-billion dollar project(yes it costs that much), and having to continuously maintain that project which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars(yes its that much) receive a profit margin of 5-10% that would not affect the consumer? I do not think so, in fact I do not think any financial company(ie banking, hedge funds, ect..) will even consider the idea of buying the roads because of the high cost of upkeep and not to mention the negative publicity attributed to raising toll costs.

And finally, nobody talks about what the reason for nationalization of the roads(though I do not agree with any government spending, you have to understand the reasoning why such a system is in place) is due to defense. The construction of our highway system is directly related to our defense initiative. The privatization of roads will not happen, for this reason and this reason alone.

Let’s ask your question with a slight modification:

Why would any private aircraft company have an incentive to make their airplanes safer? Are travelers suddenly going to care about airline passenger deaths or are we going to blame the aircraft manufacturer for any crashes involving their airplanes? If the second, wouldn’t people just fake crashes?

Again, you assume the status quo. How many people read Consumer Reports before buying a washing machine, cell phone, hair dryer, or car? In the case of cars, crash survivability ratings are often a factor for many buyers. So which do you think would collect more tolls…the highway with the good safety record, or the one famous for being a “death road”?

And if we’re going to compare things on the number of preventable deaths then shouldn’t you be focusing on same way to eliminate smoking? “440,000 annual deaths each year are smoking-associated (CDC)”

And while its a matter of choice to smoke its a matter of choice to drive as well.

Would anyone explain this non-sequitor – people died on government roads therefore government is responsible for the ‘slaughter of innocents’? Who knows maybe W. Block could run for politics tugging on these heartstrings? What if the argument was – people died on private roads therefore private operators are responsible? The government is only responsible when the driver had an accident through no fault his own. Speeding, driving drunk, driving tired, ignoring warning signs, ignoring weather reports are fault of the driver. A driver who chooses to engage in dangerous driving is the one who responsible for his actions. If Libertarians want to say “the governments built the roads therefore they’re not off the hook regardless of the actions of the driver” then private road operators will liable when accident occurs on their roads. And if a judge says “it doesn’t matter how irresponsible a driver drove, the private road operator is still responsible and can’t hide behind disclaimers” then road costs will be prohibited and won’t be provided, period.

Consumers buy with their eyes!

We’re talking about industrial goods. A private construction company building for a company that wants to sell the road by means of tolls. That company, in order to ensure that the product will reap the rewards (profit), will have to have certain qualities which are set by consumer demands (consumers will demand safer roads).

I go back to my argument about the petrol refinery. The refinery knows how to judge quality, because the basis of the quality decides at what price the refined oil will sell at.

You’re saying that the company doesn’t know how to quantify quality, when this claim is completely baseless. If it was true, then no private company would succeed because they wouldn’t be able to judge the quality of industrial-goods.

It is great that Jonathan found a good builder, but for every one of those, there is a large number of people that got screwed.

The entrepreneur who invested in a poor road, to use it to charge people with tolls, ultimately lost. But, malinvestment is a reality in all industry, and is not an argument against private enterprise.

ust talk to any person that has Chinese drywall in their house. And speaking of Chinese products, it is a good chance that you have PEX water lines in your house. PEX is manufactured by a Chinese company and there is growing lawsuits about MTBE leaching into the water supply of the homes.

But you are only undermining your own argument. The lack of quality was seen, and now the company is paying for it. In the long-run, the lack of quality doesn’t benefit the constructor (as you yourself state in your example).

And anyone putting their real estate investment in the hands of a Realtor, well they really are heading down the wrong road. Really, it doesn’t take much to be a Realtor and they only tell you what they think you want to hear. When you buy a house and they line you up with a home inspector, it is someone they know will not throw a monkey wrench into the sale, because believe it or not, Realtors are interested in the sale today!

The Realtor is also interested in long-term profits, and whether or not the company will survive in the long-run.

It is because they can offer consumers the lowest price and I am sorry to say, but price is what consumers tend to move to.

Austroglide hits the nail on the head in regards to this. The consumer is mostly willingly accepting the lower quality product, for a lower price. It’s a voluntary exchange. But, historical evidence has also shown that products not only drop in price, but also improve – the automobile industry is a perfect example, where the average automobile has dropped in price radically (taking into account inflation and an increase in purchasing power), and so has the quality (there is no comparison between a Chrysler of today and a Model T of yesterday, despite the fact that Chrysler cars may be of lower quality relative to other cars on today’s markets).