I posted this here in Great Debates because, hey, it deals with politics, and once politics come up in conversation, it automatically becomes heated. Why, just this morning I remembered this Onion article and I began thinking, “If all roads are privately owned, the owners could maximize their profits by joining together into a kind of network or union, and selling ‘annual passes’ that could be displayed on any cars wishing to drive on any of the roads in the road owners’ network – which is hardly different from the system we have now!”
Oh Jesus, that second picture is great. Gotta love the Onion.
As for your post here’s that won’t work:
Most roads you don’t currently pay to drive on–I frequently make a 6 hour trip from Baltimore to NY without paying anything other than the $1 to cross a bridge right at the end.
Umm, absentee landlords…ever heard of them? We already have plenty in every city across the country. What guarentee is there that a private owner of I-95 would keep it in good shape? After all, people pretty much have to use it either way.
Private companies/individuals can refuse to service somebody for pretty much no reason. You want to be refused permision to drive on the Beltway because your is kinda ugly?
Does this extend to the street I live on? That would be stupid. Well, then how about the one that it intersects at the end of the road? And how about the ones that cross that one? And so on…
Umm, the interstate system is not about maximizing profits (Jesus, isn’t anything non-profit anymore?). It’s about providing a way for people to get from city to city. The tolls are a necessity to pay for the maintenece of the roads. Unless, of course, you want to subsidize the whole thing yourself, and then we can all drive on them for free (thanks guy).
What I meant by the idea of purchasing annual passes that could be displayed on the cars that wished to drive on any roads belonging to members of the Road Owners’ Network, was that this could be done in lieu of a per-use fee. That is, if your car was up to snuff (i.e. not likely to cause much road wear or cause an accident with other cars), you could pay an annual fee that would allow you to drive on any road in the Road Owners’ Network for free. The members of the Road Owners’ Network would contractually agree on a way to divide these annual fees amongst themselves, perhaps based on the home address of each car’s owner. The amount of each individual car’s annual “membership” fee could also be based on that car owner’s home address, on the size of the car, and even on the purchase price of the car if the Road Owners’ Network so chose.
And once all the kinks were worked out, and the Road Owners’ Network hired a few “enforcers” to make sure that their mutually-agreed-upon driving rules were obeyed, the only difference between this system and the one we have now would be that the one we have now is controlled by elected officials.
The Road Owners’ Network would hire approximately as many enforcers as were necessary to maximize their profits; i.e. as soon as hiring more enforcers would cost more money than it saved, the Network members wouldn’t hire any more.
Let ‘em use roads that don’t participate in the Road Owners’ Network.
I’m sure somebody would run a regular bus line on these roads. So long as it was profitable.
If the Road Owners’ Network decided to allow pedestrians, then they could walk along the Network-members’ roads. Otherwise, they could not (it would be considered trespassing). Chances are that pedestrians would be allowed, as part of a deal between the Road Owners’ Network and local retailers. Whether all pedestrians would be allowed to walk for free, or whether pedestrians would have to pay a small annual or per-use fee, would depend on which was ultimately more profitable, i.e. if local vendors would benefit a tremendous amount by having free pedestrian traffic, they would pay the local Road Owner to allow it.
Same as cars. Perhaps the annual fees would be lower, since bikes and motorcycles cause less road wear and inflict less damage in an accident – plus they don’t require as wide a lane. If bicycles were popular enough, the Road Owners could even have specially designated “Bike Lanes”.
I was wondering how long it would be before Libertarian showed up, given the nature of the thread and all. I didn’t find anything specifically related to this issue on the site though (albeit with only a quick read). Do you have a link to where this is adressed specifically?
Now, to adress this nonsense.
Anybody who tells me I can’t walk on their road can shove it. Thought the libertarians were all for personal freedom and stuff. If I need to pay to walk, somebody is gonna pay with a trip to the hospital.
Anybody who tells me I need to pay to bike on their road can also shove it.
The “enforcers” we have now are cops. Many of them do other work besides traffic duty. They are sworn to uphold the law. However much I distrust cops, I trust them a whole lot more than an “enforcer”. Are you trying to turn the US into a mafia?
How does this patchwork system function at all? Can my road be owned by somebody? If so, and they tell me I can’t drive on it without paying, well, you know my answer.
You still haven’t adressed the issue of the fact that individuals and companies can refuse service for stupid things. They can say that your car is ugly, making their highway look ugly, and is therefore preventing them from running their business well. That don’t seem right.
Wouldn’t the road owners’ network or whatever be a monopoly? Then they could charge exorbanant prices–we have to use some of these roads. For example, there is literally only one road I could take to get to my ex-GF’s house. At the time, I HAD to go there. What ifd I couldn’t afford it?
Don’t the poor pay enough as it it? it’s hard to get by on very little salary. Say you only drive around downtown Baltimore all year, but once or twice a year make a trip to see family in Annapolis. As it is, you pay a small fee once or twice a year. What if you had to pay an annual fee, only to use it once?
THIS IS NOT THE WAY THINGS ARE RUN NOW. A profit-oriented fee would ** have ** to be more than what the average person pays now. * Because the government doesn’t run the Interstate system for profit–essentially all of the money goes to repairing and expanding the roads. ** So how can somebody take over a non-profit system and make profits on it without drastically raising prices, or drastically cutting costs (which would result in half-assed roads that wreck your suspension)? Explain this to me.
Yeah. Well, technically speaking, the difference between non-profit and profit is often only 1 or 2 percent, so prices wouldn’t have to be raised drastically.
I know that some non-profits are run almost as if they aren’t, and some for-profits as if they’re non (think very internet seeler). That’s not so much the issue here. And there’s also the somewhat bizarre “not-for-profit” status…
The point is, that the Interstate sytem right now is not run in a cutthroat “make money for the government” manner. It is run in more of a “we’re providing a service, we need to recoup the cost of this service” manner. So if a company is going to make money off of this, something’s gotta give. Moreover, a company often has to actually * increase * their profits from one year to the next–making millions of dollars in profit can still lead to problems (dropping stock, lack of confidence, etc) if it’s not enough. So not only would privitizing roads make the prices rise (or, as I said, cutting back on repairs), it would make them do so more and more as the years went by. Sounds like a good plan to me :rolleyes:
Just as a note–this issue of the Onion comes after a number of weeks off–three or four, I think. It is therefore entirely possible that the article was written around the time of the convention and before the death of said individual, and not published until now. Of course, this may not be the case.
Either way, it is something that one has to expect when reading the Onion–they are merciless (e.g. There was a headline that read “Ebert victorious” after the death of Siskel). Personally, I love it–but I’m sort of a sick bastard that way. Glad to see there are still some non-peverse people out there, though.
Not that it matters to anyone but Peter McWilliams died on June 14. Complications from AIDS and cancer treatments. It was reported, he died choking on his own vomit. My few weeks back is stretched.
Why he was such a big deal really was(other than being an author), he was fighting the courts to let him use marijuana for the nausea he suffered from all the medications he was taking.
They also had an article titled “Mother Teresa Sent to Hell in Wacky Afterlife Mixup” the week Mother Teresa died. I figger, hey, if you can’t make fun of grief and tragedy, what can you make fun of?
Nausea that was so bad that it prevented him from being able to keep the medication down. Had he been able to smoke marijuana, it is likely that he would have been able to live longer.
People who are for keeping marijuana illegal are generally just naïve or misinformed. People who prosecute people like Peter McWilliams in their zeal to keep drugs illegal are bordering on downright evil. Even if keeping drugs off the street was a noble goal, allowing people to use marijuana for legitimate medical reasons would not affect anything. People who are literally going to die a painful death if they are not able to obtain marijuana are not even minor contributors to the nation’s drug problem.
On to the issue of private roads. I always find it interesting that people seem to impute all sorts of undeserved vices to the concept of private enterprise, and all sorts of undeserved virtues to the government. First off, you do pay for the roads you drive on. Maybe not as a specific fee, but they aren’t exactly a gift from God.
I would suspect that whatever entity owns the roads would be prefectly willing to allow people to walk on them for free. Pedestrians really don’t incur many requirements for maintenance. You can probably imagine that they would want to minimize their own liability, and as such would be rather strict with enforcing jaywalking rules. Personally, I would be willing to pay to be able to bike on roads that have specific bike lanes, and where biking does not involve risking death at every left turn.
I think that it would be far from certain that the overall cost of maintaining and operating roads would increase if they were run for profit. For one thing, there is more incentive in a private system to economize. If I am the Secretary of Transportation, do I get any real reward if I can get everything done under budget? Are there necessarily repercussions if every road in the country is covered in potholes?
I’ll admit that I live in a libertarian fantasy world where businessmen are entrepreneurial minded, and interested in their own rational self-interest. However, I think there is more of a chance that private industry will live up to this ideal than there is that government will become efficient and uncorrupt.
waterj2: you managed to misquote me just enough to turn my points around. Let’s try this again.
That’s not what I said–I said that they are run almost exclusively to * pay the costs of maintaining them. *
So of course I pay to drive on some of them. But I only pay as much as is deemed necessary to pay for the wear my vehicle plavces on the road, not more. Obviously, this is not a money-making strategy.
Again, not what I said. I said that the cost * to me for driving on them * goes up because at current prices they can’t make a profit (see above).
I agree that probably pedestrians would be free–but that isn’t necessarily the case, as it is now. As for bikes, many places are putting in bike lanes now.
But the point remains that as of now, roads are public property. Public property is “owned” by the government. The government answers directly to me. A company doesn’t. A company answers directly to two things:
Shareholder (i.e not me)
Profits (also not me)
The government may be full of corrupt, sleazy bastards, but they’re * my * corrupt, sleazy bastards, and come election time they ** do ** need my vote.
There are repercussions if the quality of roads is bad. In the Baltimore-DC area, this has actually been a rather large issue in some of the recent elections. There were even front-page newspaper articles when the current govt didn’t get the job done.
The candidates were forced to take on the issue, and were forced to make good on their promises. my back alley has a nice, smooth, new paving
One problem with the roads in the Baltimore-DC area is all the telecomm companies digging them up to install new cable. Most of them slapped a patch on, then were not held responsible for proper repairs. Current government, aside from general repairs, is cracking down on these companies.
Out of curiousity, can anyone who tells you you can’t live in their house or drive their car or eat their food also shove it? Do you have basic moral opposition against letting people decide who can and cannot make use of property owned by them?
Nope. You see, their car or house is not now, nor has it ever been, public property. I have no problem if people don’t want me to walk on their driveway. If they convince Baltimore to let them buy York Rd, then tell me I can’t walk there, I will have an issue. Because York Rd is a public area vital to transportation through a good bit of Baltimore Co.
