Sell the Roads
Opinion Editorial by John Stossel -
Apr 24, 2009
41 ratings from readers
Privatizing roads has worked wonders for the citizens
of California, Chicago, and Indiana. It could work for the rest of us
too. Unfortunately, politicians don't want it, and people don't
understand it.
Under President Obama’s stimulus plan, the government will spend
billions of your dollars building new roads and fixing old ones.
They
say they’ll do it efficiently. I say, bull; government has never
before been efficient. It isn’t going to start now.
Need proof? How about rush hour?
Rush hours from hell are not natural phenomena. They’re man made
— more precisely, politician-made. But what if commuting didn’t
have to be a horrendous experience? What if, for example, someone
wanted to add some lanes to a road or build an entirely new road?
It’s happening. Private road builders are doing it. They built a
double-decker underground highway in Paris. A 45-minute trip now
takes 10 minutes. Three hundred-fifty cameras watch for traffic
delays or accidents. Once the camera detects a problem, a crew rushes
to tow the obstacle away so traffic keeps moving.
They did a similar thing in California, too, on Highway 91.
Instead of building a brand-new road, a private developer added two
lanes in the median strip of an existing highway. The beauty of it:
Unlike government work, the private highway is all voluntary.
No driver or taxpayer was forced to pay for the extra lanes.
Drivers can choose to use them or not. Those who want to go faster
have to pay a toll — from a buck fifty to $9 — depending on
traffic. By paying you save time. And for some people, time is money.
The success of private roads made politicians from other states
want to try leasing roads. Mayor Richard Daley did it with the
Chicago Skyway. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels leased the Indiana toll
road to a private company.
“We received $4 billion, free and clear, no taxes, no debt left
to our kids,” Daniels told me for my
ABC special “Bailouts and Bull.”
But many people are horrified by the idea of leasing roads to
businesses. When Florida considered leasing Alligator Alley, the
highway that spans Florida from east to west, people held protests
and screamed about the evil of corporate profit. Politicians shelved
the idea.
The governor of New Jersey gave up, too. A private highway is
dying in Pennsylvania and dead in Texas.
“Privatizing existing taxpayer infrastructure is not a solution
for anybody,” Congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon told me.
He also says that what Gov. Daniels did is wrong.
Daniels made money for the taxpayer. What’s wrong with that? I
asked DeFazio.
“Money that the people of Indiana could have had in the future
is going to go to a private company.” “What money?” Daniels
asks. “The toll road was losing money!” If Indiana couldn’t
make money running the toll road, how can a private company do it?
“Your first insurance that they’re going to run a better road
than the politicians did is, if they don’t, people won’t drive on
it, and they’ll lose a lot of money. They have every incentive to
make traffic flow swiftly, to make that drive as pleasant and safe as
possible.”
Private owners also have an incentive to maintain the road.
Bureaucracies let the highways decay. Why did it take a recession to
get them thinking about repairs? DeFazio disagrees: “If you have
toll roads, the toll authority, if properly run, can meet all of
those requirements.” But do they?
“I can’t account for the crummy government in Indiana or
Pennsylvania. They could run them better. They could run them just as
well as the private sector because the private sector runs it well
and makes a profit.”
But that’s exactly the point! Profit management beats government
management every time.
“When government runs things, it’s a monopoly, and it has no
competition, and there’s no upside to doing a lot better job,”
Daniels says. “That’s why we didn’t have, until this new
situation, electronic tolling. People were still stopping, chucking
quarters into baskets. Politicians never run things well.”
Why then do some congressmen say you shouldn’t sell public
highways?
Gov. Daniels has an answer: “There are people, frankly, in
Congress, who can’t abide the thought that you might be able to pay
for something without going down there and kissing their ring for the
money.”
John
Stossel is co-anchor of ABC News’ “20/20” and the author of Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media (January 2005) as well as Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the
Shovel — Why Everything You Know Is Wrong (May 2007), which is now available in paperback.
