Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.
It's not the public's job to provide customers for your toll road.
You can build your toll road and have unencumbered competition elsewhere.
Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.
It's not the public's job to provide customers for your toll road.
You can build your toll road and have unencumbered competition elsewhere.
>Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.
No I'm talking about using infrastructure a private entity has paid for as competition.
Would you call it "unencumbered" competition if I started stealing a few bucks from everybody that goes to the gas station, then paid people to take my road with the ill-gotten gains instead of the public interstate, then declared that the government is free to compete unencumbered? Of course you wouldn't, I can't just take money from everyone at the gas pump, but the government can so that their public "toll" is already paid and I can't compete even if my road is cheaper.
The end result is public roads have a mobster-type clamp on the encumbered market. You can't compete with them because they have a monopoly on violence and use it to prepay the toll to game the price at the point of use.
Huh?
What hypothetical car has the option to use your road or use the public road, but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?
Agreed, when a public road provides your customer, it's hard to win that competition.
But again: you can just build your roads away from public roads, find your own customers, and then you don't need to compete with them.
>but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?
Mine, where I live the roads for miles and miles are all private with public easements and are privately funded. Of course by your definition that would make the public road illegitimate, because it has unfairly poached a private road user (not sure I agree with that).
What's at the end of those miles and miles of privately funded roads?
Separately, how do you handle it when a neighbor decides to neglect their portion of a road?
Not sure what the illegitimacy point is about.
>What's at the end of those miles and miles of privately funded roads?
Sometimes other private roads, sometimes private property/houses, sometimes public roads. Sometimes people travel exclusively on private roads, sometimes not. I don't understand your point here, a private road isn't allowed to connect to a public road but a public road is allowed to connect to a private road? It doesn't pass any sort of symmetrical test.
>Separately, how do you handle it when a neighbor decides to neglect their portion of a road?
If they neglect their road they can't go buy groceries or use their property. So it is extremely rare, as they're basically forced to do it out of practicality, they would be hurting themselves more than anyone else. Down to the point it's well within the tolerable amount of charity. Usually some retired person comes along with a backhoe because they have nothing else to do, and until then the roads are large gridded so the roads never become impassable. In practice your concern hasn't become a problem in my years of living on private roads.
No, my point is that presumably the cars arrived on your self-sufficient private roads via public roads. Is this correct or not?
Re maintenance: Again, obviously doesn't work outside of an area that definitionally does not have very few people/businesses.
If everyone lived in density like yours, first of all we wouldn't have nearly anything good about modern life, but secondly yes we could obviously have the system you describe. I'll take public roads and modern life any day.
>No, my point is that presumably the cars arrived on your self-sufficient private roads via public roads. Is this correct or not?
Sometimes yes sometimes no.
>If everyone lived in density like yours, first of all we wouldn't have nearly anything good about modern life, but secondly yes we could obviously have the system you describe. I'll take public roads and modern life any day.
I'd say high density public roads are causing a big problems for cities. Cars are subsidized in a way that distorts the market to overrepresent car travel over private mass transit or other more efficient alternatives. I believe our cities would be much safer and more enjoyable, without losing access to needed goods, if the roads were all privatized.