The official "what about the roads?" thread

[Elwar]

This thread is solely for people who can think. People who can think outside of the box to post how they would create a road system or a way for people to travel without the need for government.

You can describe it on a small scale, at the city or county level, the state level or nationally.

Your system must allow people to have easement enough to leave their homes and get to the road system.

I have self moderated this thread to allow people to throw out ideas without people nitpicking every little idea to death.

I will throw my ideas out there but would like to see what others think (please do not just post links to other private road systems).

As a bonus, how would you incorporate Bitcoin into your system?

[Topazan]

Ok, I'll throw out some random ideas.

Local residential and store front roads would probably be maintained by some organization equivalent to a Home Owner's Association.  Businesses already share parking lots (I assume), so it's just a simple extension of that concept.

Major avenues could be toll roads.  In order to prevent long lines at the entrances, I wonder if it would be possible to tag each car with an RFID tag.  Drivers would be able to purchase "plans" based either on time ("one month of access") or on a specific number of entries.  As each car goes through the entrance, the tag is checked.  If someone enters without a valid tag, a photo of the vehicle is taken and broadcast to nearby security vehicles so they can be sued at a later time.

In crowded downtown areas, I see mass transit supplanting cars.  If it can't be made independently profitable, it can be subsidized by an association of local businesses, as I described for residential roads.

When it comes to inter-city travel, I see railroads making a comeback.  You could have a system that allows people to park their own vehicles right on flat rail cars and ride the train that way.

Emergency services would have to make greater use of helicopter transport.

[caveden]

Professor Walter Block has already written an entire book on this subject. Its digital version is available for free. Here: https://mises.org/document/4084/

[Mike Christ]

Cross-posting

I could've sworn it was the merchants who built the first roads.

Imagine this: the state went away and nobody worked the roads.  They fell into disrepair; nobody drove on the roads anymore and it really started to hurt businesses; nobody would visit the shops and you couldn't get anything delivered.

Who has the greatest monetary incentive to get the roads in shape?  If Business A gets their roads built faster than competing Business B, they'll have mad profits; there's a rush to get the roads in shape to get a leg up over the competition.  Business C decides to skimp out on the quality and gets their road-builders A to speed the process up.  Road-builders A knows that they will lose business to Road-builders B if they don't keep their standards, but are eager to make a quick buck.  It is later found out that the road to Business C is already crumbling; Business C loses more business than if they'd just made a quality road and pay the price of it, while Businesses A and B flourish with their quality roads, and refuse to do business with Road-builders A due to their previous incompetence; Road-builders A eventually lose business to B, C, and D, and the labor is scooped up into C, as they're in the metro area and have a ton more roads to build; eager for more work, many laborers of Road-builders A accept the offer.  Business flourishes in infrastructure, as every brick & mortar business needs it; the people have their roads and the businesses have their commerce and all is well.

The market works fine, no state required.  Who builds the roads?--the people who gain from the roads being built, that being, all of us.

People worry about who owns the roads because they have no idea why roads exist.  Nobody who owns a business and a road is going to deny you from driving on that road.  Simply put, they want your goddamned money.  They don't care if you're going to visit another business or going to see your grandma or traveling to the other side of the continent, denying anyone for any reason of driving on a road is counter-productive and bad for business.

But of course, this is why people who refuse to practice rationalism have such extreme difficulty imagining this.  "What if people charge me to drive on their road?"  Then people who don't charge will have their roads driven on; those who do charge lose business.  You lose more than you gain; the only way to enforce this without loss is with a state, but I won't get into that, as we're assuming it's gone.  "What if they make me drive on the wrong side of the road?"  Then, even considering they figure out a way to enforce this, you're likely to get into an accident eventually and thus, nobody will be able to drive on that road for a long time, and the same effect occurs as the toll-road dilemma: it's completely inefficient and fruitless, and the market punishes such behavior quite severely, a feature missing or must be enacted artificially in economies lacking a market.

So what about roads connected to no business?  Well, if people want them--and I don't know anyone who has an irrational fear or hatred of roads--then they'll build them themselves.  You want a road, but your neighbor won't pitch in to help, and so you refuse to build a road until he does?  Then so it will be; either find better neighbors or use diplomacy or just build it yourself.

I think it's funny; perhaps a state somewhere in Hypothetiland has taken over ISPs and offers government-owned Internet, and people are saying, "Well if the government didn't provide me with Internet, who would possibly provide it?  Who would own the cables?  How would we pay for it?  There's a good reason why the Internet is paid for with taxes, you know."  I'm sure this is the same rap given for socialized healthcare

[Elwar]

Professor Walter Block has already written an entire book on this subject. Its digital version is available for free. Here: https://mises.org/document/4084/

Yes, I have read much of this book and seen several articles/videos on road privatization. This thread is for people posting their out of the box ideas.


Here are a few of mine:

The simplest would be highways. These already exist, but could be improved upon by Bitcoin. The road I used to commute to work on had tolls, but you would buy a pass with an RFID in it and instead of stopping at the toll booth you just drive through a side lane that recorded your RFID as you passed through. For the card I would just go online and fill my account with money, I set it up to auto-draft when it got below $50.

There could be a few options of doing this with Bitcoin. Either have an account the same way with the option of funding it with Bitcoin anonymously, this would prevent any sort of way to track people's movements. Another option is having a tiny Bitcoin device that holds your bitcoins which can actually transmit a transaction at the tolls for payment.

Another option is to have a lane that is a smart road. Cars could be upgraded to be able to work on the smart lane where magnets or other devices are embedded into the outsides of the road and the car detects them, keeping a safe distance inside the lane and keeping a safe distance from the car ahead and behind. This would allow a faster commute and the ability to not have to pay full attention to the road while on the smart lane.
Smart roads also allow for the ability to charge electric cars via electric induction with a two way communication which could allow for payment via Bitcoin easily in real time using microtransactions. It would also allow for Internet communication from the road allowing people to surf the Internet and check their e-mail on their way to work or wherever they are going.
Smart roads would also eliminate the problems of drunk driving or worrying about people talking on their cell phones. And with car accidents being one of the main causes of death and drastically reducing auto accidents would cut car insurance drastically and would make up for the cost of upgrading to pay for the better road.

Highways and long distances are the easy part. The tricky part is in towns.

One obvious one is the local merchants paying for it which has been mentioned. Disney World actually has their own private roads near their parks.
For payments at roads with stop lights I had the idea that people could pay for faster light changes where the price to time would exponentially increase depending on how much quicker you would want the light to change. And it would accumulate depending upon the amount of people sending their money to get it to change. So when you are sitting in traffic pissed at the amount of time it is taking and you are in a long line of people you can just hit the amount of BTC you want to pay to speed up the light and if there is a long enough line then you can all speed it up. It would of course have a minimum amount of time to allow two way traffic. If you had a big night or an emergency you may be willing to spend a buttload on having a clear shot to your destination. Though with smart roads, if all cars are moved by the road there would no longer be a need for traffic lights and traffic would be moved at the most optimal pace possible.

For roads in front of homes I would love to own those roads and provide free use of those roads. We could get rid of all of the electric poles, telecom poles, etc. I would create the road with large cement pipes which would allow piping electric lines, telecom lines, water pipes, sewer pipes, gas pipes, heat pipes, etc.  This could also allow for multiple companies renting space and provide more competition between utility companies.

Another option for these thousands of miles of road/surface area facing the sky is solar. Either panels above roads or work on a polymer that could be used on the road to produce electricity.

[caveden]

Highways and long distances are the easy part. The tricky part is in towns.

For the "last mile" aspect of most network services - not only roads, but also water supply, sewage, electric wiring etc - probably the easiest way is through contractually shared property, like condos. The condo I live in already owns the "streets" to its parking lots. It could also share the property of adjacent streets. This would not be financed though taxation based on demagogic criteria, but by fees according to your stake in the shared property. I bet condominiums would also look for alternative means of earning money, like charging for parking spots, or eventually the ideas you raised.

Obviously, that's not the only possible solution. Nobody can actually predict what would be the ideal solution. The only thing that is certain is that free-markets will come up with a better arrangement (cost-benefit-wise) than monopolies.

[im3w1l]

A really simple local solution is a private city. Some company buys a piece of land, erects a city. Building roads and committing to maintaining them increases the value of the real estate they sell / rent out.

[herzmeister]

[...]

quite exactly how it goes in Wenzhou

http://reason.com/archives/2011/11/15/chinas-black-market-city

[Mike Christ]

[...]

quite exactly how it goes in Wenzhou

http://reason.com/archives/2011/11/15/chinas-black-market-city

Interesting!  A shame they didn't collaborate to ensure the roads would make sense but at least they've proven that roads are built without a central authority.  I wonder if our improved communications will make this a much easier task...

[caveden]

quite exactly how it goes in Wenzhou

http://reason.com/archives/2011/11/15/chinas-black-market-city

Interesting!  A shame they didn't collaborate to ensure the roads would make sense but at least they've proven that roads are built without a central authority.  I wonder if our improved communications will make this a much easier task...

And important to note: they do happen to have a monopoly in charge of building roads, which was simply not doing its job. They handled the situation as they could. Considering it was a poor region when all this started, it's quite impressive!

Very interesting article this one. Thank you for the link, herzmeister.

BTW, Wenzhouneses should be informed about Bitcoin. Something tells me they'll love it!

[Pente]

When I was a kid, my family lived in the mountains with some other families.

They wanted a road.

They pooled some money.

They rented a bulldozer.

They made a road.

50 years later and it is still there.

[herzmeister]

The problem is not cutting a switchback in a mountain side, but building superhighways or roads through properties belonging to people who don't want those roads built.  Things don't always scale up easily.

They would scale up, literally. 

[crumbs]

^^^Lol, OK.  Thanks for letting me know what i'm dealing with here

[herzmeister]

^^^ still got a trump in my sleeve:

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars (by none other than our left-anarchist friend David Graeber)

[...]

Surely, as grown-ups, we understand The Jetsons offered as accurate a view of the future as The Flintstones offered of the Stone Age.

[...]

From the perspective of those living in Europe, North America, and Japan, the results did seem to be much as predicted. Smokestack industries did disappear; jobs came to be divided between a lower stratum of service workers and an upper stratum sitting in antiseptic bubbles playing with computers. But below it all lay an uneasy awareness that the postwork civilization was a giant fraud. Our carefully engineered high-tech sneakers were not being produced by intelligent cyborgs or self-replicating molecular nanotechnology; they were being made on the equivalent of old-fashioned Singer sewing machines, by the daughters of Mexican and Indonesian farmers who, as the result of WTO or NAFTA–sponsored trade deals, had been ousted from their ancestral lands. It was a guilty awareness that lay beneath the postmodern sensibility and its celebration of the endless play of images and surfaces.

[...]

What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

[...]

Also see his article about today's bullshit jobs: http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

[caveden]

The problem is not cutting a switchback in a mountain side, but building superhighways or roads through properties belonging to people who don't want those roads built.  Things don't always scale up easily.

• Multiple roads.
• Tunnels.
• Bridges.
• Passing around
• Using secondary identities to buy the land secretly.
• Buy more than the strictly necessary land and profit from the valuation of adjacent land now better connected.
• Railroads.
• Free-market collective transports (cheaper, more frequent).
• Free-market airports, perhaps built by airlines themselves - there would be many of them.
• No cumbersome airport regulations nor TSA, speeding up boarding time and bringing the price down. Perhaps planes would become more practical than buses/trains even for not so long distances like 200km or so.
• Etc etc etc.

As you can see, there are many solutions to the "problem" you raise. And I'm just an ordinary guy, with no particular experience in the field. Imagine what millions of people competing freely would be able to build.

[Kokomoka]

I work in the middle east and I have seen small shop keepers arrange to have the little stretch of pavement outside their shop repaved. My employer (a private sector business) has recently arranged to rip up a speed bump from outside their premises and repave the road. Whilst they was at it, they also repaired the potholes along the entire road alongside their property and clear out the drains. There is a large shopping mall near my British address. They built their own access roads and car parking. Is it such a stretch to imagine that a multistory car park and access roads can be built by private industry but no other form of road can?

[MaxwellsDemon]

Instead of coming up with an out-of-the-box idea, I'd like to point your attention to one that already exists, regarding toll roads.

Recently, a new "toll lane" was constructed alongside one of Israel's busiest highways. It is privately built and maintained, and physically separated from the 3-4 public lanes of the road.
When the public road is congested (which it usually is), you can choose to bypass the traffic jam by entering the toll lane.

The really neat part is the pricing of the toll. There's a camera above the entrance to the lane, and a computer counts the number of cars entering. An algorithm automatically adjusts the price according to the number of cars already inside the lane. The more cars enter the lane, the more demand there is for using it, and the higher the price will get. A digital sign just before the entrance to the lane presents the current price, and is updated minute-by-minute. This way, drivers can decide whether to use the toll lane or the public lanes, based on how bad the traffic is on the public lanes and how expensive the toll lane currently is.

The live price adjustment can assure that there is NEVER a traffic jam on the toll lane, no matter how congested the public lanes are, by balancing demand and supply. Drivers can be certain that entering the lane will allow them to quickly bypass the traffic jam - the only question is, how much are they willing to pay for that. In fact, the company that runs the lane will not charge you if you spend more than X minutes on the lane due to congestion. This is all monitored automatically by cameras along the road.

By the way, there is no need for complicated RFID-based solutions for toll collection - the cameras do that too. They just snap a picture of your license plate and the bill comes in the mail a few days later.

[Hideyoshi]

My question to you is: Do you think a free market system would have a solution to this? Would they agree to let my pay once and then travel 600 miles?
Or will I have to pay $10 on road x and $20 on road y?

Maybe you will load your car with bitcoin, and it will pay mBTC0.00001 per mile traveled, with some roads charging 0.00002 or more.

I would like to own hydrogen dirigible some day. Hydrogen can lift much better than other gases, and can be "recharged" with solar panel and water. Even if speed is much slower than highway, you can go direct, and can still get to destination as fast. One place I go to is 1.5 hours driving, but is only 30 minutes if flying at same speed. I will be ok it taking 1 hour at half speed.

[Elwar]

Interesting video of a couple who came up with a prototype for a smart road that lights up, detects pedestrians/animals crossing to create warnings to drivers, can heat the road to take care of snow/ice, produces its own electricity, can be used to pass network traffic, pass road water to be cleaned, etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNMFKKyFU60

Why don't we have this technology being used for our roads today? You would think that some of the road company owners would want to invest and try this technol...oh wait...that's right...government roads.

[Wilikon]

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/05/05/sen-introduces-bill-to-test-out-taxing-motorists-for-every-mile-they-drive/