Who Should Own the Road? Walter Block's Case for Private Highways

Walter Block's The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors (Mises Institute, 2009) argues that every street, road and highway should pass into full private ownership and market provision, then tests that claim against informed objections. Payment arrangements are left to owners: Block suggests that tolls on residential streets might be low or absent for residents, guests and deliveries. The book's twenty-one chapters, many reprinted from earlier papers, fall into five parts: theory, applications, transition, replies to critics including Gordon Tullock and Herbert Mohring, and a concluding interview. Brad Edmonds contributes the foreword; the arguments below are Block's. Roads are a hard case for property theory, and the book earns a reading because Block works through safety, pricing, land assembly and access closely enough to expose the premises carrying his conclusion.

On safety, Block argues that a public road manager draws the same salary whatever the accident toll, while a private owner competing against other roads and transport modes would lose customers as his road gained a reputation for danger. Block's mechanism depends on customers choosing among competitors and on an assumption he states openly: they want safety and will pay for it. He leaves road rules and driver screening to entrepreneurial discovery. Private roads would still have fatalities, he concedes, and his figure of over 40,000 annual deaths is dated. Estimating how many deaths private ownership would prevent requires comparative evidence beyond this incentive argument.

Congestion, in Block's treatment, is demand exceeding capacity at a zero money price, so drivers pay in time. Some bowling alleys spread demand with cheaper mornings, a price remedy he contrasts with official appeals to stagger work hours. Electronic monitoring that speeds traffic in the lanes, he argues, moves the waiting cars to the entrances. The monthly bridge or tunnel ticket shows the reverse of peak pricing: its per-trip discount goes mostly to peak-hour commuters, so the public operator charges least for its scarcest capacity. A reader can then ask of any congestion remedy what each user pays in money and delay, and where the queue reappears.

Block answers fears of captivity with alternatives and contracts. In his proposal, a developer holding options on several routes can shift away from a holdout, and the cost of the next feasible route, or of a bridge or tunnel his property premises permit, bounds what one seller can demand. That bound holds only where such a substitute is physically and commercially available. Following Rothbard, he expects buyers to secure access easements before purchase. The bridge-and-tunnel answer rests on his normative homesteading theory, under which ownership reaches above and below the surface only as far as the owner's use, leaving airspace and minerals open to other homesteaders. These are the boundaries Block assumes for his proposed legal order.

Tullock's comment and Block's reply form the book's most instructive exchange. Tullock says he cannot prove competing local networks impossible and welcomes experiments with charging by time and use. He challenges proponents to map competing minor roads, since he would dislike an income-maximizing monopolist owning the only road from his house. Until that map exists, he prefers collective ownership, such as the homeowners association that owns his own road. Block replies with an Austrian definition, under which an industry is competitive whenever law permits entry. He adds that a developer must promise access to attract homeowners at all, which carries weight for new development. Tullock's geographic question stays open, because legal entry supplies no physical second route past a particular house, and homes built before a transition may lack the easements Block assumes.

In chapter 5, readers meet Eric Smith and Randall Wright's model through Block's account and quotations: uninsured drivers raise premiums for the insured, which may push more drivers out of coverage, and the authors argue, in repeatedly hedged terms, that controls such as rate ceilings could reach a better equilibrium. Block locates the failure on state-managed roads and suggests road firms might merge or cooperate with insurers, base user charges on insurer risk categories and refuse entry to dangerous drivers. The road-insurer arrangement remains a proposal, and it shows how whoever controls entry could also price accident risk. Block's own case for premium floors is a reductio he explicitly declines to advocate.

Readers comfortable with basic price theory get a sustained test of property and contract reasoning applied to infrastructure, written polemically and sometimes repetitively. Read the introduction and chapter 1, then chapters 2 and 5. Next comes chapter 12, where Block rejects state road pricing before privatization on rights grounds. Read chapters 15 and 16 together, and finish with the chapter 21 interview.

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Walter Block, The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), CC BY 3.0. Original source. Unmodified copy; original notices retained.