This particular item has always bugged me. Why is it that this particular type of construction project is so often considered to be something we need a government for? It's like planting flowers in your garden with an excavator.
My theory is the attitude is largely historic. The Romans excelled at road building, but the manpower needed at the time to pull of projects of that scale was only available to governments.
How would you propose funding the building of roads, though?
The problem, as I see it, is that road funding is particularly prone to monopolistic abuse - if you're the only one collecting tolls in a certain area, you could literally charge whatever you wanted, without any possibility that a competitor could undercut you because the realities of 2-dimensional geometry prohibit them from building competing roads.
I'm not saying that there's necessarily no way to manage this, but this is the obvious complaint that most people in favor of public roads see, and I've never heard a compelling argument as to why the road-owners wouldn't charge excessive fees for transit in the absence of some top-down regulation preventing them from doing so.
Subscription perhaps. That's basically what we do now, except I cannot unsubscribe from roads while buying a subscription to trains. (I can buy a subscription to trains (monthly pass), though my mandatory subscription to everything else partially subsidizes my train subscription too...). And I can certainly lose my subscription to roads (lose my "license"), although I still have to pay for it.
Bear in mind I'm not necessarily suggesting the privatization of roads. I just don't like roads being done by the same organization (or a sub-organization) as the one that does bombs and hospitals.
Some things make some sense to combine, such as "traffic policing" and "roads". Traffic police are after all the way you make sure people without a subscription to roads don't use the service. For the most part however, the various services a modern government is said to be required for have very little to do with each other.
Why not have a completely independent organization responsible for building roads?
They would be a "government" except they wouldn't involve themselves in the slightest in offtopic subjects like defense, healthcare, education, etc. In other words, not a government at all as we commonly think of it.
The importance of completely separating the organizational structures should not be underestimated. If you did so, you would no longer have the people in charge of building roads being picked by their stance on Iran or abortion...
No. Every meter. RFID perhaps; EU tried to experiment with GPS too. As far as i recall, too no avail tough.
There are things in economy called "public goods". Long story short, as soon as owners can collect toll efficiently, the roads will cease to be one. The government will hold on to that tough.
This particular item has always bugged me. Why is it that this particular type of construction project is so often considered to be something we need a government for? It's like planting flowers in your garden with an excavator.
My theory is the attitude is largely historic. The Romans excelled at road building, but the manpower needed at the time to pull of projects of that scale was only available to governments.