Stuck in Traffic: Free-Market Theory Meets the Highway Lobby

By Benjamin Ross

Summer 2006

 

 

Put a conservative in the driver's seat, and he can sound like a utopian Marxist. If you ask him about food, housing, or health care, he'll explain how buying it and selling it in the marketplace creates the best of all possible worlds. But his car has an inalienable right to free parking and open roads. "To each automobile according to its needs" is a truth so self-evident that it need not be uttered.

 

As a right-wing economist might have warned if she had not specialized in transportation, what is distributed without charge has been consumed to excess. Lavish federal and state subsidies for highway building have stimulated suburbs to spread ever farther, and driving has ballooned. The mileage that the average American drives in a year has risen steadily, growing 11% in the nine years from 1993 to 2002. Roads fill up with cars and trucks faster than new ones can be built. Major metropolitan areas suffer ever-more-severe highway congestion, with traffic in suburbs often even worse than downtown.

 

Full column at:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=658

Nice article.  It got me thinking about I-15 running thru Salt Lake City.  In preparation for the 2002 Olympics, the whole thing was rebuilt, and an HOV lane was added.  Just recently, the HOV lane was opened up for use by permit holders.  I’ll have to check what they’re charging for the permits to see if we are subsidizing “Lexus Lanes” here in Utah.

Excellent article.  It's great to see someone finally go after the likes of Wendell Cox and others. 

Interesting that these guys have a problem with land use planning being in the hands of the public sector, but they never seem to complain about government agencies being involved in highway planning. 

Cox and the rest of them..... hypocrites all.  They espouse "free market' solutions except when it comes to anything involving highways.  The good news is that the true market forces of rising gasoline prices, traffic congestion and sprawl are making their arguments more and more irellevent.

nice read yo

Benjamin Ross makes some very good points. However, he doesn't seem to recognize that public transportation should consist of more than "Big Box" transit (i.e. fixed-route bus and rail) services, which are rarely cost-effective in the low-density suburban and rural areas where most Americans now live and work. I had an opportunity to meet with Joel Garreau, Autor of Edge Cities and other best sellers, and talk about his Plan C -- personalized transit services -- which can improve transportation systems for a much lower cost than Plan A (i.e. More Highways) and Plan B (i.e. More Big Box transit). For more info, check out http://www.portlandtribune.com/opinion/story.php?story_id=33337.