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Would the owners of the roads actually profit from this ownership? I would assume the majority of owners would be companies in that area wanting to make it easier for customers to get to their store, is this correct?

It would depend on the local circumstances. For example, in a rural area a mining company would be motivated to build a road to facilitate transport of personnel to the mine site and to haul equipment and ore away. It would be in this company's self-interest not only to maintain this road but also to ensure people use it, if only to manage the traffic heading to the mine site. Once that road is in place, it would make sense for other businesses to situate themselves along it, and perhaps these businesses would pay maintenance fees to the same company that built it for the mine.

I should think that rather than having a "grid" system of roads as many large geographic areas currently have, roads in a capitalist society would take a clustered or hub-and-spoke type of design. For example, here in Saskatchewan we have a huge, sparsely populated province with only a million people living in it. According to the Saskatchewan Department of Highways, Saskatchewan's total road surface is 160,000 km - enough roads and highways to circle the equator four times. This includes 26,000 km of provincial highways. Saskatchewan's disturbingly socialist governments of the 1930's through the 1970's built this massive system of roads (at taxpayers' expense, of course) to basically provide access to every single quarter of farmland in the province.

There is no way a free society would be so foolish as to saddle such a small population with such a huge, unmaintainable network of roadways. That our roads are crumbling will come as a shock to no one here.

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It would depend on the local circumstances. For example, in a rural area a mining company would be motivated to build a road to facilitate transport of personnel to the mine site and to haul equipment and ore away. It would be in this company's self-interest not only to maintain this road but also to ensure people use it, if only to manage the traffic heading to the mine site. Once that road is in place, it would make sense for other businesses to situate themselves along it, and perhaps these businesses would pay maintenance fees to the same company that built it for the mine.

I should think that rather than having a "grid" system of roads as many large geographic areas currently have, roads in a capitalist society would take a clustered or hub-and-spoke type of design. For example, here in Saskatchewan we have a huge, sparsely populated province with only a million people living in it. According to the Saskatchewan Department of Highways, Saskatchewan's total road surface is 160,000 km - enough roads and highways to circle the equator four times. This includes 26,000 km of provincial highways. Saskatchewan's disturbingly socialist governments of the 1930's through the 1970's built this massive system of roads (at taxpayers' expense, of course) to basically provide access to every single quarter of farmland in the province.

There is no way a free society would be so foolish as to saddle such a small population with such a huge, unmaintainable network of roadways. That our roads are crumbling will come as a shock to no one here.

No joke there. I drove south from Swift Current once about ten years ago and there were spots where a chunk of pavement was out. Actually that chunk was lying right next to the hole it came from, which was odd (sort of like a golf divot), usually with potholes the pavement buckles. The road otherwise looked pretty good; it wasn't shot through with pavement cracks and tar strips, and felt fairly smooth.

I'll add this about grids vs. hub-and-spoke: Grids came to be in the Western US because that's the way the property was parceled out by surveys following the township and range system. The US was gridded into 6 mile by 6 mile squares called townships, then into 1 x 1 sections, and those in turn would be subdivided into halves, quarters and sixteenths or quarter-quarters. (In fact I live on a 1/4 by 1/4 mile "quarter-quarter", nominally 40 acres but by the time you account for it not being perfectly square (damn God for not making the earth flat!) and the space subtracted for a road along one side, I own 38 acres.) There is much less resistance to building roads if they happen to follow property lines rather than running through a property.

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I think that with the modern reliance on, and love affair with the automobile that it would indeed be possible for a road company to make a profit from roads, especially if that road companies made the system as simple and transparent to the consumer as possible.

As I said before I really don't see these roads being owned by companies who's focus is something completely different. Perhaps in the beginning when the mine or whatever is just starting out it would, out of necessity build it's own road but I doubt that they would continue to do so once it became economically feasible for someone else to take it over.

I could imagine that the cost of road usage would differ for different roads. A company that owned a fairly quiet highway would probably charge more per km/mi than one that owned the road in a city. Like perhaps 1 cent a km/car for the highway an 1/4 cent/car for the city.

I agree that there would probably be fewer roads, I also think that rail transportation of goods would be significantly increased to go along with that, and that would be a good thing.

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I don't understand how this would work. If five owners own a stretch of road and I live near the middle of the road, what happens? What if I don't want to buy the "driver's license"? I have a right to access to my property. Say I won't buy your license. If you won't let me through your check point, you are attacking my property rights.

And what happens if one of the owners of this road says, no, he wants to charge a toll, while the others go with the license idea? Who settles the disagreement?

Further, what about proportionality? Would the person who drives 100k miles per year pay the same fee as the one who drives back and forth once a week to a nearby grocery store?

I think on another thread someone mentioned road companies leasing part of their property (on the side of the road) to gas stations and stores and such...in this view, it would be no different than a mall that charges businesses $$$ per square foot of space.

I don't mind the existing toll roads for major highways, and an EZ pass system would help with congestion.

One thing that seems to scare some people is a road company buying up roads and then arbitrarily granting or denying access to the roadway, like you mentioned.

Of course, this could be solved with unilateral contracts before the road is even built or ownership transferred to private interests (something I've not heard anyone suggest yet) eliminating the fear of denial of access.

A registration-type of contract (your typical bilateral contract), or I think some members mentioned a few other neat ideas that would be effective in overcoming this. Gasoline tolls similar to the gas tax might also make it more of a "pay per use" system, assuming that the road company is large enough to avoid people buying gasoline on his road system somewhere and then driving off onto someone else's road system.

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