As Virginians, we approach the debate over transportation, land use and taxes with tunnel vision. We are captive to the way we’ve always done things, mentally shackled by our institutions of governance and business groups with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. I’ve always found remarkable the lack of interest — even in a supposedly cosmopolitan, world-class technology center like Northern Virginia — in how mobility and access are provided in other countries.
The antidote for parochialism is at hand in the form of a book, “Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads,” edited by Gabriel Roth, a scholar with the Independent Institute. This timely book deals with transportation issues both at the level of abstract economic theory and practical, real-world application.
Roth, a Maryland resident, sets the tone for the book in his introductory essay:
Road systems exhibit the usual “command economy” characteristics of congestion, queuing, deteriorating, and waste. …
A major cause of the inefficiency is the political control of road systems, which enables road users to shift the costs they impose to other road users, and even to other taxpayers. Farmers in Kansas, for example, pay to rebuild the Wilson Bridge over the Potomac to relieve congestion in Washington, D.C. Those who underpay are thus encouraged to increase their road usage at the expense of others, illustrating Bastiat’s insight that government is seen as a device to enable everyone to live at everyone else’s expense.”
Bastiat’s dictum certainly applies to Virginia, where the politically powerful influence the construction of transportation projects, from Richmond’s 288 bypass to the Rail-to-Dulles project through Tysons Corner, subsidizing sprawl and enriching speculators who own property along the improvements. The alternative, as Roth and other authors elaborate, is “de-socializing the roads” — shifting to a system in which road networks are commercialized, i.e., made self-financing, relying for revenue from road users and/or affected property owners, and in which pricing plays a much larger role than it does today.
“Street Smart” has chapters on Singapore’s experience with congestion tolls, HOT lanes in California, the rise and fall of non-government roads in Great Britain, America’s toll road heritage, Swedish private road associations and the commercialization of roads in New Zealand. Other chapters discuss strategems for moving towards the private provision of roads.
For transportation junkies, the book offers stimulating reading. My main disappointment is the neglect of land use issues. Transportation networks are embedded, and inseparable from, human settlement patterns. To a large degree, human settlement patterns define the demand for transportation capacity. The lack of discussion on this critical relationship represents a serious void. Still, there is more than enough good material here to justify the $29.95 price tag.