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There’s No Such Thing as a Freeway

Philip Greenspun raises an interesting idea based on some recent (crowded) drives in California: Why should a state with a $25 billion budget deficit give away one of its most valuable assets — highways — for free?

(Horn honk to Devorah)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 11:11 am and is filed under Congestion, Roads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “There’s No Such Thing as a Freeway”

  1. Brent Says:
    June 3rd, 2009 at 2:26 pm

    …mainly because the state has failed to provide us with real alternatives to driving. Congestion pricing works — just ask London — but it’s not fair when you’ve got no other way to get around. Give us a decent rail system, and then put in congestion pricing up the wazoo.

  2. azbikelaw Says:
    June 4th, 2009 at 3:04 pm

    Speaking of freeways, that reminds me of another “free” thing — free parking.
    http://azbikelaw.org/blog/high-cost-of-free-parking/

    In some ways, it’s not the roads that enable the SOV (single occupant vehicle)/ sprawl lifestyle — it’s the parking!

  3. Bryan Willman Says:
    June 8th, 2009 at 10:42 pm

    It’s not free and never has been. It’s paid for by property taxes, income taxes, various taxes on cars and fuels. Arguing that roads should be paid for entirely by the mile traveled assumes (wrongly) that all or even most of the benefit of the roads goes to the traveller, rather than to wherever the traveller is going.

    Alternatives have the same issue - it’s rare (never?) that fares pay for mass transit, or ferries. And certainly never pay for sidewalks.

    This whole line of “highways are free, make people pay!” is nonsense… They’ver already paid once…

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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