Over on Samizdata I did a piece yesterday about the aesthetics of car parks. I said: they ought to be prettier than they are.
But Mark of Other Languages, commenting, brought the discussion back with a philistine crash to the economics of car parks, and cars, and roads, and road subsidies.
Or of course we could just charge parked-car space and driving-car space accurately.Once the century-old subsidy to car users was removed and the real costs of different transport systems clarified and charged, most people would use public transport.
So question:
In the libertarian nirvana, in which roads are all privately owned, and the "government" such as it is would no more think of subsidising the road industry than it would of subsidising the chewing gum industry now, would there be lots of roads, or some, or hardly any?
And if there were lots of roads, would they be used mostly to transport people by bus, by jitneys and by taxi, or by privately owned car as now? Given that car owners would have to pay the market rate for car parking I mean? Unless, of course, their employers or the shops and cinemas and supermarkets trying to sell stuff to them built them car parks for free anyway.
Factor in the point Patrick often makes, to the effect that without compulsory purchase orders (yanks: that's "eminent domain"), there'd probably have been no railways to start with.
My understanding has long been that roads and private cars would still have been an economic success story even in the total absence of "the road lobby", or of President Eisenhower wanting them to defend the USA, or General Motors conspiring against trains, or any such thing. Roads and your own car is just miles better. People might use buses and taxis more, but they'd still have their own cars, and they'd use them a lot, tollroads and all.
But without government roads and government car taxes, what would have happened?
Maybe the answer is that Mark is right about car parks, and there'd be lots of roads still, but far fewer car parks.
But personally I doubt it. I think car parks would still be a big reality, and the potential aesthetic no-go areas, as I called them in my Samizdata piece, that they are now. There is no "or" about it. Revamping the economics of transport would not make the entire aesthetic problem of car parks go away, although I'm sure it would provide all kinds of incentives to deal with the problem better.
Discuss. Especially Michael Jennings, the super-intelligent search engine in humanoid form (which is apparently a description of him that he likes).
UPDATE: It looks as if there may be a fierce discussion of Mark (of Other Languages)'s comment. Kevin Connors has pitched in strongly against him.
mark just struck on something, while a digression from the main thrust of this thread, [which] is so egregious a misconception propagated by the watermelons that it must be struck down right now:Automobiles are not subsidized
On the contrary, in the US, the Federal Highway Trust Fund, which is paid for by motor fuel excise taxes, is regularly raided to support the general fund. In California, as with many other states, the general fund is also enhanced by sales taxes on motor fuels while taxes and use fees on vehicles more than cover the cost of the road system.
On the other hand, no passinger rail line runs in the black
The closest thing in the US is the San Diego Trolley, built on the cheap using existing right-of-way and refurbished cars. IIRC, it's costs run 1.4 times what it collects at the farebox.
Kevin Connors usually spells quite well. He is excited.
It could get interesting.
Comments
Yes, sorry to bring down the tone with my droning on about how road-users should pay to use road space [not to build roads, I mean to occupy them for a certain minute or hour - pricing as an alternative to rationing-by-traffic-jam...].
But on the topic of aesthetics, some cities try a certain-colour-of-car-on-certain-day-of-week policy as a way of rationing road space. I guess yellow, green and black cars would all come in on one day, and that over 1/7 of vehicles are a kind of red, and over 1/7 a kind of blue, boring bastards.
This is absolutely _not_ my suggestion for allocating road space!
But if anyone were nutty enough to try it, streets of parked vehicles could at least look a bit prettier -- strictly on the topic of parked cars and visual appeal.....
Posted by mark on March 16, 2003Although I seem to write about railways a lot, I actually like cars. I do not own one at the moment, but when I lived in Australia I did own one and it made my life much convenient. I will no doubt buy another one when it is convenient for me to do so. I am very much in favour of major programs of road building.
Firstly, the petrol tax is a dreadfully blunt instrument. I would much prefer that this is abolished and a similar amount of money raised by charges for the use of roads. These could be dynamic, so you pay more depending on the time of day, the weight of your car, the level of congestion at the time, et cetera.
If all roads were private, I doubt that the extent of the road system would change much. However, what I do think would happen would be that local roads and trunk roads would end up being very different from one another.
As far as road building is concerned, the eminent domain issue is vitally important for the building of motorways and trunk roads. I think the private sector would build at least as many of these roads as the public sector does, but without compulsory purchase legislation this wouldn't happen, so what would happen would still be very dependent on what governments did. Basically though, the private sector would be perfectly happy to build lots of motorways and trunk roads with tolls on them, and this would be fine with me.
I think that the private sector would build lots of local roads, too, but what I suspect would also happen is that these roads would end up being private in the sense that access to them would be restricted. People would not be permitted to drive on the roads near people's homes unless they lived there themselves, or they had a good reason for visiting. In effect, large areas of the countryside would end up being either de facto or de jure gated communities. And if you restrict access, large areas that are punblic spaces under the present model would get turned into private spaces. And I do not really like this very much.
The other thing which needs to be taken in mind is the cost of accidents on the road versus other means of transport. Using the roads is far more dangerous than any other activity that most of us undertake on a regular basis, and is vastly more dangerous than catching a train. It is extraordinarily difficult to put a financial value on the damage done by car accidents, but it is considerable. We do have insurance schemes that attempt to quantify this, but my feeling is that they generally understate the true economic cost of car accidents quite considerably. (I do not know the figures in the UK, but in my state in Australia, if I were to lose my right leg in a car accident, the compensation I would receive would be of the order of forty thousand pounds. I don't know about you, but I would give up a lot more than forty thousand pounds to keep my right leg).
This understatement clearly constitutes a subsidy of some sort to road transport, although it is somewhat hard to figure out who is subsidising who. (Part of it is pedestrians are subsidising motorists, for instance).
(Hmm. I haven't quite figured out when to post comments and when to use my posting privileges. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it soon).
Posted by Michael Jennings on March 16, 2003Permalink
Hey, I feel famous!
Thanks for the mention!
Posted by mark on March 16, 2003