503 sats \ 1 reply \ @Turdinthepunchbowl 3 Jan \ on: BuT, wHaT aBoUt ThE rOaDs? libertarian
Forgive me, I'll try and read the paper/article tonight when home from work, but can someone explain how this would be better for people? Initial reaction is this would end up like the city of Chicago and how they sold the Parking rights to a private company/investment fund and what instantly happened is the costs skyrocketed for people.
"There were steep rate hikes initially, including to park downtown, which went from $3 an hour in 2008 to $6.50 an hour in 2013."
Archive to get around paywall: https://archive.is/jYZJu
It's something that could go awry quite easily, if implemented poorly. However, some of these things are actually much costlier than people realize and they might not exist if people actually had to pay for them directly.
City parking, particularly streetside, has an almost unfathomable opportunity cost. That real estate is very scarce and there are much more productive things that could be done with it than just having someone's car sitting there.
That said, there are all kinds of other regulations (zoning and the like) that prevent alternative uses and create monopoly situations.
The most straight forward answer to why it would be better to privatize roads is the same as for everything else: the state is a monopoly that produces things far more expensively and at lower quality than could be provided on an open market.
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