General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

Let’s take an example: I benefit from the highways because my bread arrives on a truck that takes the highway.

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Essentially, the bottom line is that by providing free roads, we as a society are deciding for everybody that they will spend their money on roads. I believe in giving everybody individual choice to the greatest extent feasible, and that definitely includes deciding how much to spend on expressways.

You're missing a couple of things though:

1. There is very large and intangible social value to the movement of people.  Not to get too political but lots of problems in the world are caused by people being in their own bubble and not actually being exposed to different people / experiences / etc.

2. There are Government services that rely on the highway network.  Ambulances.  Fire.  Police.  Public Transportation.  Etc.  I guess we could toll those, but it seems silly.  And it still wouldn't really cover the benefit.  The mere existence of a highway network can save us from building additional hospitals, improve health outcomes, etc.  These are benefits that aren't particularly correlated with the amount of miles driven.  Instead they exist as soon as the infrastructure exists.

3. Related to 2, there are really large network effects related to highway infrastructure.  It enables a whole lot of economic activity that otherwise wouldn't be possible or profitable.  Everyone benefits from that.  Which is very different than a bakery going in (it still has economic spin-off benefit, but not on the same scale as something like transportation).

4. I don't have a 4.    But those are just off the top of my head, I'm sure there are a lot more.

(1.) is a good reason to have a free network of basic local connectivity. Two-lane roads to every address I think I can get behind, as it’s hard to imagine a world, starting from where we are, without that. Even if we all hypothetically started working hard to avoid using vehicles, we would still need those local roads for occasional deliveries to our houses. Garbage trucks would still need to come; it’s hard to imagine that taking one’s trash on the bus to the dump would ever be a reasonable way of dealing with garbage.

However, this is not a good reason to build a 16-lane superhighway. All those people on that highway could fit on a single 2-track LRT line.

(2.) again, is a good reason to have a free network of basic connectivity. Those services need to be able to get everywhere, so there need to be roads going everywhere. There do not need to be 4- and 6-lane roads, and expressways, all over the place.

(3.) is a good point, in that a single road is useless, and again this is a good reason to have a complete transportation network. But if there is so much traffic that a 2-lane road is not enough, perhaps the large volume of people using it should be the ones to pay for it.

This is a bit like saying that everybody should have enough food to live, but if you want caviar, you’ll be paying for it, and it’s expected that some people won’t be able to afford caviar.

I disagree that this is the same thing.  The caloric value of food is the same (roughly) for each person.  So its generally easy to make a distinction like this.

It's not true for roads.  A 4-lane highway from two northern Ontario towns is very different transportation service level than a 4-land highway between KW and Toronto.  It's silly (to me) to use the physical size of the road and ignore the actual context of the road.

The physical size of the road is quite important. Basic connectivity requires a two-lane road (well actually you can get away with a single lane in many places but let’s keep things simple). Four lanes are required only for capacity. If enough people want to use a road that 4 lanes are needed, splitting the cost up among them will give a perfectly reasonable road use charge. Alternately, the capacity could be handled by high-frequency public transit. Same applies to expressways, even more so. If it is unaffordable for people to pay enough to use a superhighway to pay for the superhighway, then whatever they are doing that requires them to use the highway isn’t sufficiently economically beneficial to justify using the highway.