One question that libertarians and anarchists never stop hearing is “without government, who will build the roads?” Given Bridge-Gate — an intentionally manufactured traffic jam on New Jersey’s George Washington Bridge — one might ask “without government, who will block the roads?”
The scandal emerged after four grueling days of inexplicably awful traffic turned out to be the deliberate doing of Governor Chris Christie’s deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, and David Wildstein of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a former appointee and high school classmate of Christie’s. After Mayor Mark Sokolich of Fort Lee failed to endorse Christie’s run for re-election, Kelly sent Wildstein an email reading “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
Beyond just the obvious mental agony, the traffic jam may have caused at least one death. Because emergency responders were caught in the jam, they were unable to reach a 91-year-old woman suffering from cardiac arrest.
Kelly has since been fired. Christie has claimed total innocence of the event, condemning it as “abject stupidity.” Despite that, voters remain more than a little skeptical, and Christie’s chances for a presidential run in 2016 have been damaged.
Yet while Kelly, Wildstein and even Christie may be held accountable, the institutions that they serve will not. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will continue to own and operate the bridge. The government’s role in transportation will remain unquestioned.
Furthermore, no matter how unhappy drivers may be, they will have to keep paying for the same poor service with their tax dollars. Since those funds will not be available for consumers to redirect toward preferred alternatives, the operation of roads and bridges will remain an unaccountable product of political manipulation.
What this means is that those constructing roads will be necessarily ignorant of the knowledge that could only emerge in an open market setting. Even less corrupt officials will still be in the dark about how to most efficiently provide roads and highways. The result will be more and more of those more common, less overtly malicious, traffic jams that most of us are all too familiar with.
Given that everyone pays for the government’s roads, regardless of interest or use, the wear and tear of large delivery trucks is effectively subsidized. Leaving roads in shambles makes them both more dangerous and prone to never-ending repairs, which means even more traffic jams.
Even though those more standard traffic jams aren’t directly engineered, they can also pose problems for emergency vehicles, and causing problems for emergency vehicles can still kill people. Perhaps, then, our current system of centrally planned roads and highways should itself be seen as a scandal.
This is even truer when we consider that removing the market process not only holds us back from the possibility of better roads, but also holds us back from things that might be better than roads. Considering the environmental impact, subsidizing the current car culture is nothing short of “abject stupidity.”
Even though the problems associated with the state production of roads can’t be traced back to the same kind of self-aware evil as the Bridge-Gate, they aren’t natural disasters, and there are still people worth blaming. Specifically, those corporations whose business models most heavily rely on long distance shipping and the politicians they lobby for subsidies.
Yet while correctly casting blame is necessary to understanding that what looks like a clear case of public benefit is actually a carefully disguised case of private benefit, it isn’t enough. Though the George Washington Bridge scandal can be solved by removing those responsible, more has to be done to address the deeper problems with government roads.
The worst problems with government roads are not the one-time tragedies, they’re the ones that are systemic. The ones we see every day, the ones we learn to accept.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions. In this case, the only answer is denationalization. Roads must be taken out of the hands of power and into the hands of the people.
Citations to this article:
- Jason Lee Byas, Who Will Block the Roads?, The Herald Mail [Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia], 01/23/14
- Jason Lee Byas, Without Government, Who Will Block the Roads?, Before It’s News, 01/13/14
"Roads must be taken out of the hands of power and into the hands of the people."
That's funny – your suggestion reads to me like taking roads out of the hands of the people and putting it in the hands of the capital.
"Systemic problems require systemic solutions. In this case, the only answer is denationalization."
Raise the gas price by raising gas tax and make driving on crowded roads expensive by introducing car tolls (you use cameras to photograph the cars and send bills home to the car owner based on the number plate), then you invest the money you make from this on public transport (if that isn't enough, you add money from elsewhere). Voilá, an answer that doesn't involve denationalization!
If by "the people" you mean capitalists then we have a problem because all you'll get is just another form of rent seeking. Put the roads in the hands of non-profit motorist cooperatives, I say!
"That's funny – your suggestion reads to me like taking roads out of the hands of the people and putting it in the hands of the capital."
How are roads and highways currently in the hands of the people? As for putting them "into the hands of capital," if what I favored was selling off roads and highways, that criticism might apply. However, I used "denationalization" rather than the more ambiguous "privatization" in order to avoid implying that's what I support. My own view, consistent with standard libertarian homesteading norms, is that state-owned property should be ceded to the people who actually use it, or if it was previously taken from another person, that it should go back to that person. In the case where this is less clear (say, something like a highway), it's probably best for it to become the joint property of everyone in the surrounding community.
"Raise the gas price by raising gas tax and make driving on crowded roads expensive by introducing car tolls (you use cameras to photograph the cars and send bills home to the car owner based on the number plate), then you invest the money you make from this on public transport (if that isn't enough, you add money from elsewhere). Voilá, an answer that doesn't involve denationalization!"
This would definitely raise gas prices, but that doesn't do much toward solving the problems I'm referring to. Most of the problems I'm referring to deal with the fact that we don't have any way of getting good knowledge about how to best allocate resources toward efficient transportation. Your attempt at a solution presupposes that we do.
As I told ubereil, my preferred method of denationalization doesn't involve selling off state property, it involves ceding it to those currently using it (i.e., members of the surrounding community). Incidentally, I do think that a would result in a very large portion of roads would be run in the non-profit motorist cooperative way you're referring to, but that was beyond the scope of this op-ed.
If we're denationalizing, I think that the Christie family should get first dibs on this particular road/bridge with any leftover Sandy funds (;
"How are roads and highways currently in the hands of the people?"
They're owned by the state. In Sweden that's usually referred to as publicly owned – because it is owned by the state and the state is run by a fraction of the people put there by the rest of the people to serve the people. The streets I use on my way to work is owned by me and everyone else who lives here, and together we decide how they're handled by voting every once in a while.
You could say the voting process is too crude and indirect (we're essensially voting for who is to decide who gets to manage the roads and all the other publicly owned resources) and I'd probably agree. But it's still in the hands of the people – if we're not pleased with how they're handled the person in charge gets fired (we try to find a better one, but the problem with democracy is that it's good at getting rid of bad leaders but a lot worse at finding good ones).
(Unless it was our foregn minister Carl Bildt – but that man sold his soul to the devil for the super power of being immune to politcal controversy. I think he's survived around five controversies that would have buried any other politican. But he's an exception, and an exceptional one at that.)
"Most of the problems I'm referring to deal with the fact that we don't have any way of getting good knowledge about how to best allocate resources toward efficient transportation."
That's a very vague problem and thus it's difficult to make any call either way. What are you hoping to achieve that can't be done with the state taking responsibility for roads (apart from "the libertarian society")?
The way I read what you said was thatthe problem was traffic jams (there might be other problems) and the cause was that we don't know how to allocate transport resources. In that example I provided a few examples of how to can reduce traffic jams (that we know work, because sometimes we actually evaluate the policies we implement).