The Tories are thinking of introducing tolls on new roads as a way of funding desperately needed infrastructure in this age of austerity.
I think is a wholly sensible idea. Indeed, it rather begs the question, why don’t they go further? If tolls are right for new roads, why not introduce them on existing ones?
Indeed, why not privatise the primary road network altogether and allow the new private sector owners to toll users? This way, the state could release value from this huge asset helping to pay off public sector debt and providing a funding stream for new infrastructure. It would also reduce the state’s liabilities on long term and on-going road maintenance costs. And, it would help tackle congestion with a market system that would make the most efficient use of the road network by giving financial incentives for people to travel at non-peak times.
I can’t think of any reason against the idea, apart from the fact that it may not be that popular with the electorate given that they’ve enjoyed free, state funded roads for generations.
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Absolutely - but I wouldn't stop at the "primary network" - th thing I'd really like to see is people in control of their own residential streets.
It must be one of the most common complaints on the doorstep is the state of the road/pavement/parking and so on and you know perfectly well that to promise anything would simply be dishonest because the money allocated to these roads is so vanishingly small that you probably stand one chance in a hundred years in some places of getting any work done (unless someone sues for an injury - which is a sure fire way of getting something done!).
This is a bit difficult to follow I found, and the technology has moved on, but as a background paper about one way of doing it, I like this.
Yay, lets privatise the roads! I can't wait for thousands of cars to 'rat-run' through my village to avoid paying charges for the nearby A40.
I suppose we could establish a whole new level of bureaucracy in my village to charge drivers for travelling through. More income for my village, more jobs for bureaucrats and more disruption for drivers having to stop to pay tolls.
I suppose we could automate it, so that anyone coming through my village could have a smart card. They would of course need a smart card for the next door village - oh, and all the other villages they travel through.
Brilliant plan. Unless you visit the 'Real World' for even a second.
As usual, 'wit and wisdom' is in possession of neither...
I don't claim to have all the answers, but that's what entrepreneurs are for (both business and social entrepreneurship can be harnessed to solve problems if they are allowed to).
There are some matters which need considering - currently heavy road users do not pay for the cost of the roads or their use, which distorts markets leading to many of the problems the left (rightly) complain about but (wrongly) seek authoritarian ends to solve.
I find the Hoppean style privatisation to be deeply unsatisfying however. There are other forms of property rights than private ownership - for example historic rights of way do not derive from private ownership of the land, but historic communal use, and that should be respected.
Certainly, all new roads should be built privately, with no state intervention in any way.
Residents ownership of residential roads is another great idea too generally.
A few suggestions for villages who find themselves in the middle of a rat run:
Gate the roads - with automatic or manual gates. Or there are plenty of other possible traffic calming meaures.
A toll system is also perfectly possible - I'm sure standards will arise which allow people to have relatively few automatic passes (my experience of automatic tolling in the US is that systems end up becoming unified in local areas), and cash/credit card is always an option. To assume every system will be completely different is to be deliberately obtuse.
Thinking about this for 5 minutes - there would probably also be companies happy to take on the tolling for a village if they get to keep the receipts.
Living in the real world is great - its a pity so many think the real world only consists of their little bubble of priors and lack of imagination...
Ah, the good old 'it will all work out for the best' argument, brilliantly posed, Tristan.
What do villages which don't want to be gated or have private companies deciding who comes in and out do?
What do rural areas where there might only be one road in and out do?
I'm beginning to see an Elysian free market world in which, once more, the well off who can afford it all get to live in these gated nirvanas while the hoi polloi struggle with the residue of public roads which are allowed to decay over time.
Do remember, oh free marketeers, that the market has been tried for centuries and it was found wanting. That is why the state grew in the 19th and 20th centuries. It may be time to trim back in some areas but a return to the 'Hobbesian' past is not one I fancy much.
When claiming that:
"Do remember, oh free marketeers, that the market has been tried for centuries and it was found wanting. That is why the state grew in the 19th and 20th centuries."
...it might be worth remembering the name of this blog, and what the eponymous hero is probably best known for cutting his political teeth on. Free market? States have been granting privilege, monopoly and tarrifs for as long as they have existed, to the advantage of the few and the disadvantage of the many. The further growth of the state, despite the best efforts of our liberal brethren who knew better and cautioned against, has made that problem immeasurably worse. I don't recall there being a military-industrial complex of any great size in the 18th century - something, however, that has allowed states to go around killing 200m people in the past hundred years.
Or the millions more who have been impoverished through state dillution of their money - a stealth tax that has been used to finance those wars and those corporate friends of government.
Of course it will "all work out for the best" - that is the fundamental essense of a liberal mindset - that humanity is clever enough to work out, without some "organizer of mankind" as Bastiat calls them, how to deal with complex problems that arise. It is the conservative that needs to know in advance the outcome of everything they propose - the "can't do culture" writ large.
I too am not a traffic engineer, but there are some ever so simple answers to some of your "can't do" points that even I can think of - your village that doesn't want to run its own roads for example could club together, voluntarily, with other villages - nowadays we call it a county council but it is not voluntary and not cheap, and they might fix your road, as I said in my comment, every hundred years or so on average at the current rate.
It's the paucity of imagination that bothers me - perhaps that's it, democracy is "control by and for those with no imagination".
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