My first question is, What happens to the taxes that pay for the highways? Presumably the feds won't lower the income tax (for those making less than $200k, that is). Will state gas taxes disappear?

I'd suggest auctioning off politicians instead, but they've already been bought and paid for.

Another question is, won't there still be a need for some sort of oversight? Interstates and US highways all have to conform to certain standards, even if the work is left to state highway departments. Leaving that up to the market would probably mean rundown roads - you know some companies will just let things go to pot in order to maximize profits. Or will unnecessary parallel roads be built in the name of competition (and sprawl?)

A few years ago, here in Colorado, some dope wanted to build a toll highway called the "prairie parkway," which would run parallel to I-25 from south of Pueblo (which is 100 miles south of Denver) to north of Fort Collins (near the Wyoming line), but running mostly about 30 miles to the east, skipping all the major cities and towns.

No one ever made money on passenger rail. It was subsized by the government during the private years via the mail contracts. When the USPS cancelled the mail contracts, the railroads clamored to be let out of the responsibility of running the trains. That's how we got Amtrak.

Privatizing the insterstate sounds like an absolutely dopey idea, so the conservatives should love it. I say go for it, with the provision that whoever ends up owning them has to pay property tax on them.

And private air traffic control will be wonderful until the first horrific crash caused by some dumb private enterprise solution.

I wish this country would learn from its mistakes and stop trying to beat the square peg of Reagonomics into the round hole of rationality and mature society. But, on the other hand, that's part of what makes living here so interesting.

Privatizing utilities always turns out so well.

I'm generally against privatizing services that are most efficient when there's only one of them (phone line to your house, water line, highway from here to California). But then I'm also against the massive amount of money we pay for our highways. I could be convinced this is a reasonable idea, assuming we keep regulatory control over prices. And maybe just lease the roads for 50 years (in case we want the right of way later for rail).

yet another scam foisted on us by the rich. get ready for higher costs & worse roads while the private road owners make out like bandits. how stupid is anyone to consider this anything other than another ginormous give away to the rich? cienna, you should be ashamed of yourself.

Mass transit and bikes would not be immune to tolling. So this would be a bad thing. If you live in Lake City, but work in DT Bellevue. Toll to get onto I-5, toll to exit onto 520 (or I-90) toll to exit onto 405. No slow downs because its all automated but in a worst case scenario, the morning trip might cost 10$ in tolls, one way, just to get to work.

Imagine driving down the freeway, and every couple of miles running into a toll-booth; not the every 20 or every 50 miles sort of toll-booths you see in the Northeast, but every COUPLE OF FUCKING MILES! Because, a bunch of private corporations have bought up all the concrete and are now free to charge drivers (who previously paid to build those roads out of their tax dollars) whatever they want to use it.

Or: Imagine you're driving from your home to the freeway. You get to your on-ramp only to find it's been closed. The company than now owns that section of freeway discovered they weren't making enough money off toll traffic at that location, so they shut it down, forcing drivers to use an alternate on-ramp five - or ten - or twenty miles away, because it's more profitable.

Whenever a piece of PUBLIC infrastructure gets privatized, the PUBLIC gets screwed. Haven't we already had enough examples of this to KNOW it's a "stupid fucking idea", as Cienna says?

No.

However, all road projects should be funded through use fees: gas taxes, tolls and vehicle registration, and subsidies for the oil industry should end. THAT would be a huge wake-up call for everyone as to the true cost of our automobile infrastructure.

ultimately, this is about exactly the same thing as everything else going on in our government... shifting the burden of costs more & more & more to the middle class & the poor. so we still pay the same gas taxes, and under privitization we get to pay for tolls too. it's really the ultimate win for the rich, not only do they shift the costs of infrastructure further onto the populace, they get to take a huge profit right off the top.

Yes, ultimately it IS a bad thing. Private companies do what private companies do best: maximize their profits. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's exactly what they're created to do.

Yet in the case of roads, electricity, water, etc--in short, the necessary infrastructure to support robust economic vitality--the goal, the best possible public good, is found not in maximizing profit for a single private company, but in maximizing the ability of all private companies to be profitable. And at that, government--not driven by profit--is far better suited than private industry to excel.

The tax money raised annually--and indefinitely-- from a vital economy lubricated with an easy, low cost transportation & energy (& information, I might add!) infrastructure that operates at cost rather than for profit, more than exceeds the selling price of the individual elements.

Even forgetting all the political & social ramifications, from strictly simple a profit/loss standpoint, it would be just plain bad business for the government to privatize its infrastructure.

This is one more step in their efforts to completely dismantle the Federal Government. They want to privatize everything. Companies, accountable to no one but the mythical free market, will run everything in their world.

They are attempting to create a corporate dictatorship. Why is this even a discussion? Is it a bad thing? Yes. Of course this is an awful idea.

Unless you like living as a goddamn serf.

Because government asset firesales did so much good in Eastern Europe...

How much history can the Libertarians ignore? All of it, or just most?

Horrendous idea. We already paid for the interstates. We paid a lot. User fees should pay for the upkeep- gas taxes and such.

Also if they are privatized, drivers will be paying out of pocket to use them. Do you realize that user fees like gas tax and such, only pay for 1/3 of road construction and maintenance costs? The other 2/3rds are paid for out of general funds? If a private company starts charging 100% of the costs, and tacks on a 30% profit, there will be a war. People will go apeshit if they knew the true cost of driving. And because the costs are so high, everybody will start trying to travel surface streets.

How do you think that will affect prices of goods and services? How do you think that will affect tourism? If it happens, do you think our taxes will suddenly go down because the government is no longer paying for roads? LOL!

Stupid idea all the way around!

@4: As a conservative, I also think it’s a dopey idea for reasons enumerated by @10.

Conservatives, and even some libertarians probably, do actually believe there is a role for government: to provide for the general welfare, infrastructure, and defense.

Yes, because private highways work so great in....ummm....remind me what countries has private highways?

They are mostly in Latin America and Africa, wonderful examples to follow when it comes to good governance principals.

What if a private owner of a highway shuts down service in Wyoming because it is deemed unprofitable? Sorry Wyoming, you should have thought about the invisible hand of commerce before siting your stupid state in such an unprofitable location. I think we know who we can blame for this whole federal highway mess.... our country's most liberal president, Eisenhower.

The two main sources of gross resource misallocation in the economy due to government subsidies are 1) farm subsidies for corn and soy and 2) road subisides for long stretches of highway through sparsely populated areas.
The first gives us our grotesque meat and sugar centered food supply. The second gives us our anti-local environmentally destructive freight trucking driven supply line.
Any classical economist would insist on fixing these first before worrying about other ways in which the government distorts the economy.

Selling off public resources makes for short-term gains. We'd have a few years of wealth and then, so many years down the line, a bunch of shitty toll roads that a handful of companies are making money off of. They would only enjoy as much maintenance as is required to meet regulations, so little would change in terms of quality.

So yeah, shitty plan from short-sighted assholes.

We've already had a preview of sorts of this type of privatization with the deregulation of the airlines. That started a 30 year race to the bottom: bankruptcies, union busting, increasingly poor service, nibbling fees.

Privatizing the interstates would be similar in that there would still be some pesky regulations that would magically prevent profitability unless some new fee were added. Or, maybe we just need to get rid of those regulations and let the amazing market decide.

Once you get rid of those regulations, then maybe the owners of the roads can start to determine what type of car would be allowed on their roads. Or that drivers need to have a certain, new form of insurance. Then we find that only white people can get that insurance. (Proceed farther down rabbit hole.)

There is a reason people have banded together for centuries to create free roads and other public services, and it was not profit motive.

So, let me get this straight-

Ms Madrid wants the federal government to abandon the constitutional federal burden of interstate transport, but retain the unconstitutional one of supporting Planned Parenthood?

I'm so confused.

If motor vehicle fuel taxes ("gas taxes"), both state and federal, had kept pace with inflation and increased fuel economy over the last 40 years, there would be more than enough money to maintain all of our roadway infrastructure.

But because we've drunk too much of that conservative Kool-Aid ("all taxes are too high and should be cut, or at least never, ever increase them"), that doesn't happen -- and people who should know better complain about the lack of maintenance.

So here I am, basically missing from Slog for two years due to my giving up a desk job to go back to school. I come back to my old job for the summer, go visit Slog, and THIS is what happens. Lame.

If you're gonna privatize a road, make it the roads the state is forced to build at taxpayer expense whenever some developer gets a wild hair to build a 400 unit burbclave out in the middle of nowhere.

why, some economists ask, should the federal government be in the electricity business?

Because Enron, that's why.

Public Private Partnerships (P3s) are excellent for governments, citizens, and the companies that operate the assets.

What many of these comments fail to point out is that the P3 contracts between the governments that own the assets and the corporations taking them over are immensely complex and restrictive. Price controls about tolls, and how quickly they can rise. Covenants about maintenance, and safety, and whatever else you can imagine. Basically the governments can set the terms of the contract, and if any corporation feels they can make money on the venture, they put in a bid. If the restrictions are too onerous, and the investors feel (after extensive research and financial modeling) that the potential profits do not justify the risk, then the state continues to own and operate the asset (the status quo).

We should sell the 520 bridge to Goldman Sachs. Thorough betterment

Yes, because long stretches of privately-owned tolled highway will be well-taken care of. I'm sure those owners will have every incentive to invest their tolls into road care, and won't spend a dime of it on things like salaries and return on investment. Because if they don't take care of their highways, someone will... I don't know... build competing ones right alongside them?

Another question: What will then happen to all the State DOT employees? Will they lose their jobs, to be replaced (or re-hired) by private sector workers? Assuming that one way the private sector claims to increase efficiency, maybe a third of the jobs will be shed in that transition.

So this idea would eliminate jobs.

Aren't the Republicans on a gung-ho streak where they decry everything they hate as "Job-killing" ? As in "Job-killing health care reform", "Job-killing tax increases", and "job-killing contraceptive services to low-income women" (okay, I made that last one up).

So how can any fruitcake libertarian or conservative ever support as utterly nutty as- oh, never mind. I think I answered my own question.

If there are toll booths every three miles and it costs so damn much to drive, that's a good thing. Higher transportation costs will in the long run encourage denser city living (with all the reduction in greenhouse gases that implies), travelers will choose train or plane travel when they need it, and in the meantime there will be lots of revenue for schools and such.

So where's the bad part of this? The inconvenience for a few years until people have fundamentally restructured their lives to minimize the annoyance of toll roads? Come on, objecting sloggers. You didn't think people would make sustainable choices just out of the goodness of their hearts, did you?

Essentially Facebook privatizes government itself.

Speaking of confusion, SB, you feel that funding planned parenthood is unconstitutional, even though none of it is for pregnancy termination, but you support abstinence only education.

Hmmm.

Proper highways needed for emergency services to operate might be a good ground level for what a private company can do with highways, and with out being end current traffic flows (the closing of ramps commented on above).

Let's see what the past Republican schemes produced. The Savings and Loans were looted and the tax payers got the bill. Then they cooked up the Wall Street schemes and the homes and 401Ks were looted and the taxpayers got the bill. Now they want to loot the entire government? Are we the stupidest people to ever walk the fucking earth???????

@32

My objection to Planned Parenthood funding has nothing to do with abortion. It has everything to do with the federal government acting outside the very limited mandates the Constitution established.

I could say the same thing about any welfare program, Social Security, farm subsidies, the Department of Education etc. The individual states may well have a role to play in these, depending on their own founding documents. But the federal government has no legitimate business in any of them.

And where did I say anything about sex ed, ever? As it happens, I don't want the school doing the job my wife and I have, inculcating values in our children. Age appropriate and accurate information as to sexual function and activity from the school present no problems for me.

I second what Timrrr @13 said. The cascading ramifications will be bad for the economy as a whole.

If the republitards want to experiment with privatized roads, why not pick the most conservative state in the union, privatize all their roads for a 5 year experiment, and see how it goes. Don't foist it on 300+ M people at once. (Or ever).

Yes, privatization... so good for the jails!

And hey, Michigan privatized road maintenance a half-decade or more back... look what happened, roads in worse condition and more expensive maintenance. Fancy that.

@34

Liberals? Oh beyond any doubt! But console yourself, Republicans will clean up your messes, if only to save our country.

@ SB, I apologize for that - I was sure you had written in favor of that elsewhere on slog.

That said, I don't think your constitutional scholarship is such that you can make that claim about what is and is not allowed.

@ 37, look at Texas to see what happens when Republicans are put in full control for a decade or two.

Sure, why not? It worked so well for the schizophrenic, dystopian future America in Snow Crash.

@37,
When in the past have republicans cleaned up messes created by liberals?

There are certain things that should never be privatized and infrastructure is one of them. If we allow our highway system to become privatized, it will end up being just another business, the people will get screwed every way they can. Maintenance will be even more of a nightmare than it is now since I highly doubt a private owner will actually be willing to spend what it really takes, unless it means lawsuit.

The GOP's "solution" to cleaning up ANY mess is simply to pile a bigger mess on top of it.

Selling off some of the gold in Fort Knox sounds like a good idea, since the price is so high right now. Helping to bring down the price of the stuff would benefit people who need to use it for industrial purposes, too.

Chicagos recent experience with privatizing their parking meters is instructive.

@46,

Hmmm... Eisenhower created things by sending advisors there first. The democratically controlled congress in 74 were the ones who voted to cut off funding which basically led to the end of U.S. involvement...

I wouldn't go so fart as to say Vietnam was a republican mess cleaned up by liberals, but it also wasn't a liberal mess cleaned up by republicans either.

As the poster at 27 points out, a public/private contract isn't necessarily the end of the road. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Italy has major through routes privately operated and tolled, and I've yet to complain about maintanance or closed roads in my time there. And I absolutely can't say the same about the mass transit systems plagued by frequent and pointless strikes.

Nor are low traffic areas underserved. Those areas remain in the control of various levels of government, while the potentially profitable main routes are partly privatized. The road to our village, which may have 10 residents even owning cars and visits from family once or twice a month to the remaining 40 or 50 full time residents, is maintained, and it doesn't even show up on road maps.

Granted, the system is somewhat expensive from an American perspective. For me to go from Rome to Lunigiana, about the distance from Seattle to Yakima, costs around $25 or $30 in tolls, plus the not inconsiderable expenses of fuel, maintanance and insurance. This should delight liberals though, since it would undoubtedly curb private car use to some extent.

I don't know the comparitive costs between private and public, so don't advocate either. But those haven't been the concerns raised here by and large.

I think Chicago's highway system, which has fallen into 3rd world levels of disrepair, is a perfect example of why the private sector should never run major infrastructure. The taxpayers built the roads, the rights were auctioned off at a tiny fraction of the price of building the roads, those roads were left to crumble for 40 years, and now that replacement costs are unavoidable for the private 'owners' the tolls are going through the roof. And when they do repair work, it is of a substandard quality and done on a very slow timeline (see the Dan Ryan Expressway rebuild).

I would say that private tolling is fine, but only for roads that need repair...make the companies that want them pony up the dough for major repairs at the outset-

@51

That's a function of privatization done poorly. The residents of Chicago benefited from tolls that didn't accurately express the costs of maintanance, and now have to pay the piper.

It's like living in a condo whose board doesn't levy enough in dues for maintanance. When the 4 or 6 million dollar repair comes up caused by deferred maintanance everyone hollers, but no-one asked the board to raise dues when it would have done any good. Indeed, had they raised the HOA dues everyone would have screamed bloody murder and voted them out.

Generally this is what liberals want. They want good transportation infrastructure, education, defense (though only when they're threatened) and so on. And they want the top few percent to pay for it all.

It doesn't work that way. My taxes are part of the expense of running my business. I don't sigh deeply, stroke a check to my demanding Uncle Sam and go on. I build those costs into the final price of the product I sell. So does GE or Safeway or any other business. The only difference is that smaller businesses can do this less, since they're more directly answerable to their customers. High taxation benefits the very corporate businesses liberals hate so much.

In the end, if you want a cradle to grave nanny state mitigating your bad decisions in life, you will pay for it directly in taxes or indirectly in cost of living.

Nice broad brushing there, SB.

This is just silly, now we're going back to Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. The Civil War decided all of this, I refuse to fight it again.

First, let's note that "privatize" is a conservative euphemism for "profit from neglect while fleeing from oversight" before we discuss anything.

@52,

Generally this is what liberals want. They want good transportation infrastructure, education, defense (though only when they're threatened) and so on. And they want the top few percent to pay for it all.

No they don't. They want the top to pay more, not all, a fair amount for what this country has given them in order for them to make it to the top. Liberals want corporations to pay more too. Big corporations make a killing in profits, based in a country that gives them huge benefits (e.g., oil subsidies)... they should pay back a killing in taxes too. Liberals also want the middle class to pay too, and not the bare minimum either, but a fair amount.

Great, let's start with the South. Let's allow the Southern shit hole states privatize their highways. Everyone will naturally avoid visiting their states and they'll come visit, and spend money, up North instead. Also, if all of the highways are toll roads I bet you'll find people drive less.

If I were a trucking company, I'd buy some key highways and not allow my competitors to use them.

Some of you have misunderstood. Republicans don't clean up messes, Republicans clean up during messes.

Most of you posters seem to ignore or not understand publicly owned utilities. A privatized Interstate would undoubtedly be operated as a public utility, or rather a collection of public utilities such that no corporation would control more than a small portion (say 10%) of the Interstate system. An Interstate Utility Board would approve rates, maintenance, and extensions. Conceptually this is no different from the power and natural gas systems.

Major objections: The privatized system would cost more since the companies would expect a profit and the board would have to be funded. There would probably be constant bickering about rates and repairs which would open the way for more lobbyists. The schedule for repairs and new construction would probably be even longer than it is now. The board would eventually (actually probably less than 10 years) would become captive of the Interstate companies, like the Interstate Commerce Commissions with all its deficiencies.

While a private interstate system could be made workable, there are few, if any, benefits except to the owners and lobbyists.

Most of you posters seem to ignore or not understand publicly owned utilities. A privatized Interstate would undoubtedly be operated as a public utility, or rather a collection of public utilities such that no corporation would control more than a small portion (say 10%) of the Interstate system. An Interstate Utility Board would approve rates, maintenance, and extensions. Conceptually this is no different from the power and natural gas systems.

Major objections: The privatized system would cost more since the companies would expect a profit and the board would have to be funded. There would probably be constant bickering about rates and repairs which would open the way for more lobbyists. The schedule for repairs and new construction would probably be even longer than it is now. The board would eventually (actually probably less than 10 years) would become captive of the Interstate companies, like the Interstate Commerce Commissions with all its deficiencies.

While a private interstate system could be made workable, there are few, if any, benefits except to the owners and lobbyists.

Why the fuck throw the conservatives any bone? Fuck them. They're ruthless uncompromising assholes anyway. Also, I often read whiny rants in the newspaper about how Public Utilities District commissioners make 6 figures a year. Big fucking deal. I ask myself would the ranters rather have the Public Utilities run by a private corporation and pay higher rates because the CEO will make at least 8 figures a year and pay dividends to stockholders, or just keep the Public Utilities public and quit bitching about the commissioners?

Being a born and bred East-Coaster, toll roads are nothing new to me. To date, they have been run by the state. The efficacy of tolls is debatable. Some state's toll roads are in a sad state of disrepair - the PA Turnpike springs to mind. Some toll roads are still jam-packed, a la I-95 in the NE corridor. Some non-toll roads are convenient and in good shape, like I-70 and I-68 in Western Maryland. And some states with no toll roads have fantastic roads, such as WVa (but there's another factor there, and that's that they spend almost all of their road funds on major interstates, and don't even bother to pave most of the secondary roads...it only works in a low-density state). A lot depends on whether an alternative and fairly convenient route is available, the level of the tolls, the purpose of the tolls (maintaining the roads versus reducing congestion), and the competency of those charged with managing the roads/tolls.

PA proposed leasing the turnpike, like these proposals in a lot of ways. While that doesn't sound like a bad idea, it probably wouldn't have worked out as well as hoped. This will be longish, so bear with me. We first have to lay out the necessary expenses: maintenance, toll collection, management, accounting, and oversight. Each of these expenses is paid for by either tolls or tax revenue.

Maintenance can be done most effectively by contracting out the work to construction companies that specialize in, well, construction (to keep it shorter I won't explain why, but I think most people get it). The state is already doing that. Now, could this process be done more efficiently? Maybe. IF a construction company with a strong accounting and management division were leased the rights to collect tolls and use them to maintain the road, the middle-man of the government would be cut out, and greater efficiency would be achieved. However, this company would still have to do at least one thing that they DON'T have expertise in: collect tolls. This doesn't seem like too hard of a process, but given the move to electronic toll collection, but the need for continued live toll collection, and that efficient toll collection is necessary for the road to be an efficient route, it MIGHT prove problematic for the average construction company to develop this expertise. A dedicated maintenance contract, where the construction company consults on the maintenance needs, costs, and appropriate toll levels to achieve the best maintenance outcomes would achieve the same result without requiring the government to give up domain over what is, ultimately, a public good.

Management is troublesome in both the public and private sector, in different ways. Public-sector managers are paid less than their private-sector peers, and therefore tend to have less experience and knowledge, as the best managers have more attractive offers in the private sector and typically leave. Not to say that there aren't dedicated, amazing public-sector managers out there - I know a few of them, and these people have a true sense of public service - but there are *fewer* of them. On the private-sector side, managers are significantly more costly, directly necessitating higher user fees to fund this management. At the end of the day, I'd say this is a wash: you'll get greater efficiency from the private sector but lower costs from the public sector.

Accounting follows basically the same trajectory as management as far as efficiency versus costs, but an additional accounting layer is necessary if the tolls are managed by a private company. As toll funds must be managed properly as a matter of public trust, the accounting practices of a private company collecting a public user fee must achieve BEST practices, and be subject to public auditing. Most private companies are audited, but a slightly higher degree of scrutiny must be applied to a private company utilizing public funds.

Finally, oversight is the one additional cost that must be borne at a much higher level if the roads are privatized. As others have mentioned, a profit motive is strong motivation to do the minimum in maintaining the roads. However, the safety and efficiency of our roads is of the utmost importance to all of us. Even those who don't own a car or ever drive receive consumer goods that are transported over interstate highways. It is because of this additional cost that I am anti-privatization for ACTUAL MANAGEMENT of our road system. Oversight costs would have to be paid out of either tolls (a part of the lease cost) or some other tax revenue. As it stands now, the state decides what maintenance needs to be done, develops the specs for the maintenance, and then pays a company to do it. Under a privatized system, the private company would have to assess the maintenance needs for the roads, develop the specs for the maintenance, submit its plans to the state to make sure that they're adequate, and then conduct the maintenance, all funded from either tolls or tax dollars, but with an additional step that adds costs.

It's only when ACTUAL MANAGEMENT of the roads is forked over that costs rise and I'm opposed to forking over control to the private sector. I'm especially opposed because the "high bidder" on the PA turnpike proposal was not a construction company, with the in-house expertise to conduct the most important aspect of the management of the road, but CITIGROUP - who as far as I can tell, is only good at screwing me (I have my student loans consolidated with them and, boy, do they suck!). A well-designed public-private partnership, where a construction company provides its expertise in construction and maintenance management to the state, may lower overall costs and would probably be a good thing for road users (direct and indirect).

Nuance, lost on the GOP.