Collective Conscious

This is a bad, bad, bad idea. The details are even worse. One would think that sell­ing a nation’s road sys­tem would be a move under­pinned by the argu­ment that pri­vate oper­a­tors under free-​​market forces could charge opti­mal usage fees to motorists and there­fore reduce con­ges­tion, yada yada yada (this is in itself a ques­tion­able propo­si­tion, but at least it’s an argu­ment that could be made). But in fact the Gov­ern­ment is really plan­ning a weird finan­cial gimmick:

[I]t would not mean motorists pay­ing for the priv­i­lege of using roads that have already been built. Instead the gov­ern­ment would be com­mit­ted to pay­ing the pri­vate con­tract based on a for­mula linked to the num­ber of vehi­cles using the route.

Woah there. That would fairly obvi­ously give the Gov­ern­ment a bucket of cash now and a debt to pay later — what com­pany would take such a deal if it wasn’t going to be, in the end, a net trans­fer from the gov­ern­ment to their pock­ets? The incen­tives run all the wrong way — roads to be main­tained at the bare min­i­mum and the traf­fic load to be max­i­mized, when really what we want to do is get cars off the road. The gov­ern­ment gets a raw deal too — but there will be some very well placed peo­ple per­son­ally enriched.

(Photo: Shahram Sharif)