Item — HN Reader

Do we ask the highway system to be profitable? If we eliminate the rural routes and only leave the profitable ones, we might as well get rid of the entire thing - the profitable routes could easily be privatized, but as it is, they offset the cost of the rural routes a bit.

I support keeping country folk connected to the rest of the nation as a public good, not a profit center.

6 comments

The same subsidies which "keep the country folks connected" act to systematically encourage people to be wasteful and pollutive in their lifestyles and habits. http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/37986?in=28:46&out=30:1...

If we did ask the interstate highways to pay for themselves (e.g. by raising the federal gas tax to fully cover the cost of the interstate highways), we'd go a long way towards putting various modes of transportation on even footing and enabling people to choose the optimal solution for each trip.

I can't think of a more easily targeted tax.

Have you thought about all the people who are unemployed thanks to gridlock on the US highway system? The massive inefficiency of people (in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.) wasting 2-3 hours per day sitting in their car going 5 miles per hour is astounding.

If the highway system were not held back by government planning, much of this inefficiency and waste could be eliminated, and reallocated into productive pursuits. Imagine if 80% of a city's' commuting professionals had two hours more per day to spend money on things (or to work more).

It's easy to assume that highways are one aspect of central planning that works, but in urban, congested areas they are a disaster that hits the poor the hardest.

Also, by making it seem "feasible" to live in suburbia and commute into the city, they led many middle class workers to flee cities, eroding the tax base, and causing the decay of city governments/services, etc.

Everything has tradeoffs. The highway system got us a way to ship military personnel and tanks across the country, and benefitted home builders and strip mall owners, at the expense of the urban poor.

I don't understand your argument. I don't know how gridlock on the highway system causes employment. I was born, raised, and currently reside pretty deep in the city of Chicago, so I'm familiar with commutes, though usually on public transportation, because the interstates are largely for long distance travel. They remain 2-3 hours a day (sometimes) without touching a highway, as they were before cars were even owned by average working class people. I have never owned a car in my life, and have no interest in or ability to drive.

The highway system is a result of government planning. If it hadn't been "held back" by government planning, it would lack existence. This would be a tax on every good imported into the city (which is virtually every good.)

I don't assume that highways are one aspect of central planning that works, I think that highways are one of a multitude of aspects of government (which I suppose you mean by "central planning") that are justified because, while not being profitable in themselves, they reduce friction for the entire system. The government is the only actor who can levy fees for that from the entire system, therefore the only one who can execute it.

If the tax base is eroded in a city, this is a failure of paperwork, not a physical event. If black people and the white people who ran from them were in slightly closer physical proximity, but still entirely homogenously clumped together (assuming a huge decline in public transportation not caused by the highways) you're saying that there would be some benefit to the urban poor?

"I don't know how gridlock on the highway system causes unemployment," rather:)

I see there is another Kunstler fan on HN! An upvote for you, sir.

For anyone else interested in this line of argument, there is a great introduction that Kunstler did for his TED Talk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ

Never heard of him but I'm definitely going to watch that talk :)

>If the highway system were not held back by government planning,

What do you mean by this? Are you opposed to the EIS/EIR process?

No, but such a process would be compatible with a far more aggressive/creative approach at facilitating the widespread cooperation (among public and private entities) needed to solve the problem.

Perhaps government has a role in highway planning, but I think it should act more like cooperation infrastructure provider rather than system designer.

>No, but such a process would be compatible with a far more aggressive/creative approach at facilitating the widespread cooperation (among public and private entities) needed to solve the problem.

That's pretty much what happens now in the environmental process. The problems tend to come because of political, engineering, legal and/or financial issues that get in the way.

It's not as though the government says "this road shall be built here!" and then does it. A problem is identified ("we need to move people from here to here"), several options are created ("we could build a transit line, expand an existing road, build a new highway, build a bridge, etc"), and then opinions from the community are sought as part of the Draft EIR/EIS.

One area that does need improvement is more consideration of projects on a regional basis (the effect on neighboring states for example rather than just looking at the immediate project area), but public and private entities are most certainly in the loop for current projects. If they weren't, these entities would just tie the project up in court.

Well, I think the ideal role of government would be to facilitate the sort of meta-cooperation necessary to solve the problem. The current planning/funding role clearly doesn't work.

How would the free market fix that problem? Do you have to pay a subscription fee to get a road to your home or business?

I don't think cutting mail service to 2 days a week would disconnect 'country folks.' Anything time sensitive could use email, fax, or (more expensive) private delivery services.

Plus, it's managed horrifically. What sort of real company would have a union contract that categorically prohibits layoffs and mandates rich pensions for basically unskilled workers?

I live in a semi-rural area and honestly, I'd rather pick up my mail at the post office. Our carrier delivers letters to the wrong houses at least once a week. I really don't know how much of my mail I never get, I only assume that other neighbors do as I do and redeliver the mail correctly.

I support keeping country folk connected to the rest of the nation as a public good, not a profit center.

What, exactly, is the public good in having the rest of us subsidize mail service to rural people? It's not like they couldn't get mail - they'd just have to pay what it costs.

Where I live I pay more for land than people in rural areas do, but I don't expect them to subsidize my house. Why do they expect me to subsidize their mail, their airports, and their roads?

I support keeping country folk connected to the rest of the nation as a public good...

I support having country folk subsidize the rents of people who live in cities.

I'll then attach the word "public good" to goods which are rivalrous and excludible in order to confuse the issue with ideological feelings.

I guess whatever line of argument you thought you were laying out, it got lost in the attempt at snark?

Because I don't follow this even a little.

Pessimizer is advocating having people in cities subsidize private goods purchased by "country folk" for no apparent reason. He also misleadingly referred to delivery services (which are rivalrous and excludible) as a public good.

I was doing the same thing, but swapping city people and country people.

It's a very convenient simplifying assumption to know that you can send a message to anyone in the country via the exact same method without having to do any complicated lookups. It's going to complicate everything that touches the mail system (read: almost every business) to have this facile assumption become untrue. It is very good for business, and by extension the economy, to streamline this kind of thing. It's not just subsidizing people out in the country.

Flat rate mail delivery is convenient for some businesses. Other businesses would find the benefits of cheaper mail delivery outweigh the costs of `curl www.privatemailcarrier.com/api/cost/?from=12345&to=67890`.

Why should the businesses capable of handling lookups be forced to subsidize the businesses unable to do so?

It's convenient for all businesses in that it's one less thing to worry about/have to analyze/potentially have to negotiate. The tech savvy businesses in this case (don't fool yourself into thinking that a majority of businesses can do what you just pointed out) provide a tiny subsidy in order to help improve the general health of the economy, which in turn benefits them by providing a healthy customer base and a pleasant place to live.

For large businesses that rely heavily on mail for customer communications, the solution you point out is laughably oversimplified. The difference between Chase knowing that they can definitely send mail to 100% of their customers is vastly different from them being able to send mail to 99%, especially if there's any sort of legal mandate to provide something via mail.

If you are correct, variable rate mail will find few customers and flat rate mail will survive.

Regardless, you still fail to explain how forcing technophilic companies to subsidize technophobic companies is good for the economy. Would it also be good to force companies with computerized ledgers to subsidize companies with paper and pencil accounting ledgers?

From what I understand, the entire reason why we have public goods is because to have it private would cause many people to be left without service.

If it were privatized, the companies would not bother to spend money servicing routes which do not add to their profits, leaving many Americans without mail service.

And honestly, if the private companies had to deliver to every house 6 days a week, they would probably be far less profitable than USPS is.

A public good is something that is nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. Air quality, for instance. If a good is rivalrous or excludable, it isn't a public good. That's the definition of the term.