Originally Posted by
antongast
BrushStart, step out here into reality for a sec, wouldja? How do you expect privatized roads to work in real life? What if the street in front of my house is owned by Bill's Roads, Inc., and Bill owns a lot of Toyota stock so he decides I can't park my Oldsmobile on his street? And then I pay Bill a toll to get to the end of my block and turn onto the cross street, but oops, that's owned by George, and by God, George doesn't want me driving there at 8pm on a Wednesday, that's when he gets his beauty sleep. Plus I have to pay a new goddamn toll to a different company using a different tolling system every time the road I'm driving on switches ownership? And the infrastructure underneath, is that owned by private companies too? Are they the same companies? Do they have to pay each other to dig up parts of the roads to fix water mains and such? What if Bill and George start feuding, and make us choose whose roads we want to drive on? How is any regional planning possible if everything is owned by different companies? The situation you're advocating would be a total fucking mess, especially in urban areas with dense street grids.
Then think about privatized transit. You'd basically end up with a bunch of duplicated transit infrastructure on the Woodwards and Gratiots and Grand Rivers where all the profit is, and absolutely nothing on the Puritans and Conners and Clairmounts. The solution would be to regulate who can run where and what kinds of fares they can charge, and at that point there's really no reason to have private operators involved except to make a political point about how much you hate it when the government does stuff.