Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

A freeway costs a billion dollars but if enough people use it, the cost per mile is low & folks are willing to pool their resources via taxes to build it, and as long as the freeway is “free,” the societal calculations make sense. Beaches have already been determined to be community assets and force public access: The Rich can't rope them off for their exclusive use. Access across rivers, across deserts, and into cities is almost the same thing but without a citizen's lobby pushing back, we seem to be losing that Right of access due to toll roads. Toll roads are the very definition of “rent-seeking.” There is no arguable reason that toll roads should exist except government collusion with private business.

Private toll roads have an entirely adverse impact on the economics of society. Toll roads rely on high volume to finance them & the tolls often add up to a significant portion of a Middle Class wage-earner's income. On-the-other-hand, a toll road is a fantastic deal to The Rich: the tolls themselves are a negligible part of their income while the benefits are staggeringly good: convenience, increased economic activity for their business, efficiency, speed & comfort. The Rich don't care how much tolls are, they simply look at all the regular people clogged up in the cheap lanes with no concept of how all those people made it possible for The Rich to get fast access at the expense of everyone else. No math explains this obvious handout to The Rich, and nothing is more blatantly exploitative: if the people paying those go-fast tolls were actually paying the real cost of transit, the amount would be in the hundreds of dollars, possibly thousands.

Worst of all, privatizing a public freeway is completely criminal and against the public's interest. Politicians guilty of this travesty are as guilty as any bandit, and should be imprisoned, possibly executed.