Welcome Back
In the first part of this essay, Murder on the Roads: Part I – Intersections, I discussed road intersections, examining problems and showing how the state has a disincentive to solve these problems and an incentive to exploit them instead.
From the Wired magazine article cited in Part I:
The common thread in the new approach to traffic engineering is a recognition that the way you build a road affects far more than the movement of vehicles. It determines how drivers behave on it, whether pedestrians feel safe to walk alongside it, what kinds of businesses and housing spring up along it.
Although the state tacitly denies its accountability in road design flaws by blaming drivers with laws and fines, this doesn’t mean that drivers aren’t accountable for their behavior behind the wheel. The point is that governments exploit traffic problems while doing little to solve them.
Studying what drivers do naturally can assist engineers in designing safer, more efficient roads. Instead of trying to control drivers’ behavior with laws and cameras, the idea, as presented by Hans Monderman, is to use road design to bring out optimum driving behavior.
For example, roundabouts don’t make people less likely to be running late. Rather, they cause drivers to slow down naturally as they approach, thus creating a safer intersection that naturally handles traffic.
Reader Response to Part I
I’ve received some excellent feedback from readers, one of whom points out the following:
Traffic lights, speed limits, and arbitrary and unnecessary rules produce exactly the opposite of what is intended – people no longer think at all about their driving.
One reader says that he finds roundabouts to be “stressful." Another reader from Australia says that they are unpopular there for the same reason; he believes this is because the roundabout “actually requires driver input." I agree: roundabouts require and promote an increase in driver awareness.
This reader tells it like it is:
Maybe if there were more roundabouts, drivers would put their cell phones down and actually drive their cars.
It must be kept in mind that not all roundabouts are created equal. Most existing roundabouts were constructed by states, which, as monopolies, lack the incentive for quality and efficiency that results from market competition. Furthermore, the roundabout is not the best solution for every intersection; some intersections with roundabouts would be better off designed differently. A competitive, truly free market, without state involvement and interference, results in ongoing improvement, not an ongoing increase in problems.
The Construction Racket
In most cities, potholes and other road damage are a major public concern and a hot topic in local elections. As this BBC article explains:
English authorities last year paid out 47.3 million in settling claims by road users for damage to vehicles or accidents due to road structural conditions. The figure for Wales was 5.3 million and for London 16 million.
According to the article, the problem results from misappropriation of money and insufficient long-term investment. In a free market, a company with such a poor record of doing business would not survive against the competition.
If private companies owned roads and generated revenue on a per-use basis, budget allocation would likely not be an issue. There would also be two strong financial incentives to maintain quality:
- Quality, safety, and efficiency would ensure an increase in use by consumers.
- Unlike governments, private companies don’t have the power to collect taxes. Consequently, financial liability for injury and damage claims is a greater incentive to maintain quality for private companies than it is for governments.
As philosopher and writer Stefan Molyneux points out in this YouTube video on solving environmental problems without the state, property ownership encourages long-term investment in upkeep.
The BBC article quotes Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) chairman Jim Crick as saying:
Short-term spending is an expensive and wasteful way of using taxpayers’ money to patch together the capital’s roads.
Crick is pointing out that short-term, reactive responses to road damage, such as the use of tar and gravel, are Band-Aids that do nothing to address root causes. Such endless short-term spending would drive a private business into the ground.
In Houston, Texas, road construction is often woefully inefficient, with some streets waiting a year or more to be repaved. This neglect is not due to size or complexity, but rather to lack of incentive. For example, in 2005, portions of Old Spanish Trail were stripped bare for repaving, then abandoned for months at a time. Over the subsequent 18 months or so, road crews have returned sporadically. As of this writing (January 2007), repaving has been completed on one side of the street, leaving the pavement uneven and the unfinished side rough and riddled with potholes and open manholes. Furthermore, the lowered surface level of the unfinished side creates cliff-like entries into driveways along the road, which drivers must negotiate with extreme slowness and caution to prevent vehicle and tire damage.
Texas’s revenue is among the highest of the U.S.’s 50 state governments. Claims that inefficiencies are due to budget problems ought to arouse suspicion. Austin blogger Sal Costello did some investigating of his own; as it turns out:
A General Accounting Office report of state highway construction shows the median cost of a road lane mile in the US to be $1.6 million per lane mile. A look at 130 east of Austin shows it costs a whopping $7.6 million per lane mile. And, San Antonio’s 281 is a jaw-dropping $27 million per lane mile!
The Texas Department of Transportation uses what are called Comprehensive Development Agreements (CDAs) – road and land development contracts under which tax dollars are distributed to private corporations for road construction.
Could this CDA system be a recipe for corruption? Could CDAs be a factor in the inefficient management of Texas’s budget? This Associated Press article may be sufficient to answer that question. If there were no corruption to hide, why would contract details be kept secret? Why would Texas have an interest in making secret deals to protect a construction company from its competition? Is it possible that this is because that same construction company, Cintra-Zachry, donated enough money to the right politicians?
Government meddling in the transportation industry has consistently resulted in corruption and ineffectiveness. In his essay The Role of Transportation in America's 19th Century Internal Improvements Debate, Thomas J. DiLorenzo writes:
There was so much waste and corruption that Ohio “stood as one of the chief examples of the revulsion of feeling against governmental promotion of internal improvement.” In 1851 the state amended its constitution to prohibit both state and local government subsidies to private companies. Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan were even less successful with their subsidy programs, enacted in 1836 and 1837. In three short years the subsidized canal, road, and railroad projects were all bankrupt and unfinished. By 1840 each of these states also amended their constitutions to prohibit state subsidies for internal improvements.
And:
Government subsidies for internal improvements in the 1830s were a complete, total, financial disaster. As described by historian John Bach McMaster: “In every state which had gone recklessly into internal improvements the financial situation was alarming. No works were finished; little or no income was derived from them; interest on the bonds increased day by day and no means of paying it save by taxation remained [emphasis added].”
In the 19th-century U.S., tax-funded internal improvements projects involving railroads, roads and canals were such monumental disasters and so rife with corruption that internal improvement subsidies and corporate welfare had been banned in every state by 1875.
As DiLorenzo concludes in his essay and as Stefan Molyneux shows in the YouTube video cited previously, payment on a per-mile basis is inefficient and a recipe for corruption.
Freeways and Wide Thoroughfares
As long as the state monopolizes the road-building business, we may never know whether freeways and wide thoroughfares are the most economically feasible approach to urban road design.
On first consideration, the multi-lane, high-speed freeways found in American cities may seem like a good idea: they allow large numbers of cars to travel long distances rapidly. But these freeways are also very dangerous. In the Wired Magazine article cited previously, Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman is quoted as saying:
“A wide road with a lot of signs is telling a story. It’s saying, go ahead, don’t worry, go as fast as you want, there’s no need to pay attention to your surroundings. And that’s a very dangerous message.”
Such roads not only create dangerous driving conditions, but also lead to urban sprawl and massive overuse of land. Indeed, in many cities, freeways have defined, and continued to define, the patterns of urban and suburban growth. The result is metropolitan areas spread over enormous expanses of land, condemning millions of people to horrific daily commutes.
Cars have become an integral part of life in America, and though Americans love them, consultant Ian Lockwood points out that “The truth is that most people are prisoners of their cars.” It might be more accurate to say that people are prisoners of road design and urban sprawl. Changes in road construction philosophy and in patterns of city growth could enable people to enjoy their cars without being “prisoners."
As transportation engineer for West Palm Beach, Florida, Lockwood oversaw a road redesign project whose results illustrate this point. Wired reports:
In West Palm Beach, Florida, planners have redesigned several major streets, removing traffic signals and turn lanes, narrowing the roadbed, and bringing people and cars into much closer contact. The result: slower traffic, fewer accidents, shorter trip times…. When the city of 82,000 went ahead with its plan to convert several wide thoroughfares into narrow two-way streets, traffic slowed so much that people felt it was safe to walk there. The increase in pedestrian traffic attracted new shops and apartment buildings. Property values along Clematis Street, one of the town’s main drags, have more than doubled since it was reconfigured.
Granted, a city of three million cannot convert all its freeways and wide thoroughfares into two-lane streets overnight. And the urban and suburban sprawl that they have spawned cannot be undone with a wave of a magic wand. But West Palm Beach’s experience exposes possibilities. Similar projects could be undertaken in localized areas within any city, with similar benefits.
It’s time to rethink the practice of building more and more freeways and wide thoroughfares as the backbone of urban development.
I Can’t Drive 55!
Are there any benefits to lower speed limits?
In 1974, in response to the OPEC oil embargo and resulting energy crisis, the national speed limit was set at 55 mph. The National Safety Council estimated that this saved about 17,000 lives per year, a 15% drop in traffic fatalities.
By 1995, when the 55-mph speed limit was repealed, the energy crisis of the 1970s had long since ended. Yet two years later, in 1997, with no energy crisis and the 55-mph speed limit out of the way, the traffic fatality rate hit an all-time low.
Highway Robbery
A study on the relationship between local revenue and traffic citations in North Carolina from 1989 to 2003 confirmed what anyone might have suspected: that revenue maximization is a primary motive behind traffic tickets.
So governments can maintain traffic circumstances that promote human “error” and disobedience, and exploit them for “revenue." If taking steps to solve traffic problems (i.e., to improve traffic safety and efficiency), like building roundabouts at intersections, would eliminate these opportunities for exploitation, then don’t these governments have a powerful incentive not to take those steps?
The pervasiveness of this problem is illustrated by this story from the Tulsa World:
A state [Oklahoma] law, approved in 2003, allows the state to prohibit a city or town’s police department from enforcing traffic laws on state or U.S. highways if state officials determine that its traffic enforcement practices are being conducted on the outskirts of town but within the city limits and if such enforcement generates more than 50 percent of the town’s operating revenue.
The very existence of this law constitutes acknowledgement on the part of Oklahoma’s state government that traffic laws can and are exploited by local governments for revenue. As the World reports, several town governments were designated as speed traps under this law:
The town of Moffett, with a population of about 179 people, received 78 percent of its revenue from traffic fines in 2003 and 84 percent of its revenue in 2004, Philippi said. Figures for 2005 were not available.
Every day, county and municipal courtrooms are packed with people fighting fines – most of us have been there. Entire industries, such as the defensive-driving class industry, have developed in response to this government-created problem and profit immensely. Numerous lawyers and law firms generate most or all of their revenue fighting clients’ traffic tickets.
And because traffic tickets are their bread and butter, these businesses, in turn, have a powerful incentive to oppose any change that would reduce the number of traffic tickets issued – and more to the point, to support politicians who oppose such changes.
Truckin’
Companies use 18-wheelers and other large trucks to ship all manner of cargo, from dangerous liquids to lumber; these vehicles significantly add to the number of fatalities in collision accidents. But big rigs’ bad influence doesn’t stop there: accident rates and traffic congestion are further exacerbated by the damage to road integrity caused by large trucks, and by the common occurrence of debris, such as tire retread and lost cargo, left in the path of traffic.
Governments fund road construction. As a result, when a company uses trucks to transport its products, it is externalizing a significant portion of its transportation costs to the taxpayer. In a free-market system, this situation would be different: because of the risks big trucks pose to other traffic and the wear and tear that they cause to roads, higher per-use rates would be charged for these vehicles. This is already the case on many government-run toll roads, such as the Harris County toll roads in Texas and the turnpikes in Oklahoma: tolls increase with vehicle axle count.
In addition, a free market might produce such solutions as truck-only lanes, or separate, more durably constructed roads for trucks, with different fare schedules based on weight or axle count. Such solutions, in turn, would increase demand for shipping innovations to reduce the cost of transporting goods, further stimulating the market. And superior roads could lead to relaxed weight restrictions, allowing for increased shipping efficiency.
Conclusion
This two-part essay has shown that the state has an inherent disincentive to solve traffic problems. Consequently, government monopoly on roads has resulted in countless injuries and fatalities, urban sprawl and traffic congestion, damage to vehicles, and other preventable or reducible negative consequences.
So, in monopolizing road construction, are our governments perpetrating mass negligent homicide and unethical, brutal exploitation? A look at history shows that these are all-too-common results of state power.
Questions are often raised regarding the proposition that free market roads are a viable solution to the problems discussed in this two-part essay, the most obvious being, “So, how would roads be paid for?” As Stefan Molyneux points out in his article “Worst. Meeting. Ever!," coercion is all too often an easier approach to complex problems than developing genuinely good solutions. Roads have been built and managed exclusively by coercive monopolies (governments) for decades; as a result, it has never occurred to Joe Public to wonder whether there might be a better way. The common belief that the market could not handle roads (construction, operation, and maintenance) usually arises not from careful consideration of alternatives, but from the exact opposite: a knee-jerk refusal to consider alternatives.
In his 2003 LewRockwell.com article “Abolishing Government Improves the Roads," Brad Edmonds states:
One of the objections to privatizing roads is that we'd have to stop at a toll booth at every intersection. A 5-minute commute to the grocery store would require, for me, three toll booths, 75 cents, and become an 8-minute commute, according to this objection.
But Edmonds describes one of any number of potential solutions to this problem, based on how similar issues are solved in the market. (Please refer to his article for the specifics.)
The real question is: What if entrepreneurially-minded people had the opportunity to pursue the development of solutions to road and traffic problems? With the same incentive that exists in all markets, namely the possibility of coming up with something great and striking it rich?
February 20, 2007
