A while back I asked what “liberal pro-transit types” thought of highway privatization measures and other such things. Ryan Avent has since taken up the topic, in a helpful post that combines what I think are appropriate measures of hope and concern. Money quote:
We’re not going to find ourselves in an ideal world, with a sim-city private manager trying to optimize total metropolitan output subject to certain, social welfare maximizing environmental constraints. We’re going to be handing over pieces of a complicated, interconnected system to private firms, and in doing so, we’re going to be reducing the influence of a (one assumes) social-optima oriented government on structures that display a lot of positive and negative externalities.
It would be beyond stupid for me to suggest that governments have performed these planning tasks ably in past decades. That doesn’t mean that efficiently managed private projects are going to produce better net metropolitan outcomes.
It should go without saying that that parenthetical “one assumes” is pretty crucial, since as Ryan for one will be happy to tell you government policies very often aren’t oriented in the right sorts of ways, and I think that we can all agree that a road-oriented privatized system that at least has drivers pay their own way is better than a road-oriented government-run system that puts the coast of construction and upkeep on the backs of drivers and non-drivers alike. But no doubt there’s a lot of work to be done to try and tweak privatization measures so that they slant in a more pro-transit direction and ensure that drivers foot the bill for at least a significant portion of their negative externalities. But I’m happy to see Ryan writing about this topic, and doing so with what I for one found to be a prima facie surprising amount of sympathy for something that I had taken to be nothing more than a libertarian hobby-horse.
RTWT, and more please!
(Image via Flickrer grazie, davvero.)
Filed under: government/law, transportation
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