Only the Government

Only the government would complain when the number of customers using one of its services grows. At least, that’s the case with an article about the increase in freight traffic as UPS, FedEx, and other shipping companies make more deliveries due to on-line sales. Supposedly, a “siege of delivery trucks is threatening to choke cities with traffic.” If roads were properly priced, of course, this wouldn’t be a problem–but if they were properly priced, the transit lobby wouldn’t be able to steal $16 billion a year from highway user fees.

In a statement sometimes attributed to Will Rogers but whose true author is unknown, someone said, “the solution to congestion is for government to make cars and business to build the roads.” Whoever said this understood that government tends to create shortages of things that people want, while private businesses tend to create plenty.

Speaking of private businesses, Waymo–the new name for the spin-off company developing Google’s self-driving cars–is inviting residents of the Phoenix metropolitan area to apply to be among 500 “early riders.” The company will loan 500 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans to families to try out. Apparently, this is on top of cars that have already been loaned to 100 families in the area.

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“As an early rider, you’ll be able to use our self-driving cars to go places you frequent every day, from work, to school, to the movies and more,” says Waymo. The video implies that even children will be allowed to ride in such cars unaccompanied by licensed drivers. This just shows that, while supporters of big government fret that too many people (other than themselves, of course) will use the services they want to subsidize, private businesses are busy solving the problems.

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About The Antiplanner

The Antiplanner is a forester and economist with more than fifty years of experience critiquing government land-use and transportation plans.

4 Responses to Only the Government

  1. OFP2003 says:

    I rode on a commuter rail train on tracks parallel and near WMATA tracks. I thought the WMATA tracks were abandoned due to all the rust, deterioration, and all the staining on the concrete. Since these are mainly cosmetic issues I wonder if they are included in any of the maintenance backlog estimates.

  2. LazyReader says:

    regardless of driverless autos. This is a question of allocation, the transit lobby and government, namely representatives are the ones who support the construction of transit as a public good when it’s a public burden. No the failure in logic here is that these small and moderate size cities want transportation infrastructure on par with their big city cousins. They don’t HAVE THE POPULATION and thus the tax base to afford billion dollar projects. So they expand their “vision” to the suburban outskirts; you end up with something like Washington Metro or a lot of commuter rail in this country. They expand the tax base so suburbanites now have to pay for something grandiose they’ll probably never utilize in their lives. So a billion dollars in construction for a city of less than half a million becomes fiscal disaster years from now when it needs to be rebuilt.

  3. prk166 says:

    Maybe they can get UPS to use those fancy new trolleys they’re installing in Cincy, MKE and DC for package delivery?

  4. prk166 says:

    The article on the delivery increases doesn’t share much of anything concrete to show that the delivery’s are having a meaningful effect on urban congestion. It’s not clear that it is, after all the author dwells on a DC UPS driver who parks his truck in a spot and does some delivery-chaining ( a la trip chaining ). Most cities don’t have the the vehicle / density / space problems that NYC has. Even in core cities, many of the re-developed / gentrifying areas like the Gulch in Nashville or Denver’s LoDo are full of rebuilt streetscapes and new or modified buildings already designed to handle these deliveries.

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