In December, 2004, France opened the Millau Viaduct, which by some measures is the largest bridge in the world. More than a mile-and-a-half long, supported by pylons that are as much as 1,100 feet tall, the bridge carries auto and truck traffic as high as 900 feet above the Tarn valley below, reducing the journey across the valley from many minutes to barely more than 60 seconds.

The bridge cost 394 million euros, well over half a billion dollars in today’s money. What was most interesting to me is that not a penny of public money went into construction (though some was spent on planning). Instead, this was a public-private partnership, meaning the public granted a private company, in this case a construction company called Eiffage, a franchise to build, operate, and collect tolls from users of the bridge. After a certain number of years, in this case 40 to 75 depending on the amount of tolls collected, ownership of the bridge reverts to the public. Continue reading →

Not long after the Preserving the American Dream conference, I was approached by Jon Caldara, who had attended the conference and encouraged me to form an American Dream Coalition. But now he wanted me to come work for his organization, the Independence Institute, Colorado’s free-market think tank.

Jon came to lead the Independence Institute via an unusual path. He had a business doing stage lighting for rock-and-roll bands when he decided to run for the board of directors of Denver’s Regional Transit District (RTD), whose fifteen members are elected from individual districts. Jon got himself elected by the Boulder district in 1994 and was later named board chair. Although he was unable to prevent RTD from putting light rail on the ballot in 1997, he led a successful campaign against the tax increase. As a result, the institute offered him the job of being its director in 1998.

At the time, Denver already had one light-rail line that, ironically, had been built as the indirect result of the Independent Institute’s actions. The institute’s founder, John Andrews, helped persuade the state legislature to require that RTD contract out a portion of its bus routes—initially 20 percent, later half—to private operators. This reduced costs by almost 50 percent per vehicle mile. Andrews expected RTD would spend the savings expanding bus service. Instead, it used the funds to build the region’s first light-rail line, which in the long run proved to be more wasteful than letting RTD operate all of its buses. Continue reading →

Sales of the Vanishing Automobile went really well. Although my publicity was limited to a web site and speaking engagements, it sold faster than my previous book, Reforming the Forest Service.

This made me realize that there was a lot of grassroots opposition to urban planning fads such as smart growth and light rail. To promote that opposition, I decided to bring experts and activists together in a national conference.

Previous conferences that I had held, such as the 1984 Mission Symposium, had been backed up by a staff of at least four or five other people. But I organized this conference, which I called Preserving the American Dream, by myself. Continue reading →

While I was in transition from working primarily on public lands issues to working primarily on urban issues, the Forest Service was in transition from focusing primarily on timber to focusing on something else, but it wasn’t quite sure what. Chief Thomas suggested that it should focus on ecosystem management, but ecosystem management doesn’t pay the bills, especially since no one was quite sure what it meant.

My reform proposals called for the federal land agencies to be allowed to charge market prices for all resources and be funded exclusively out of a fixed share of those revenues. I suspected that, on most national forests, this would lead to recreation becoming the most important use, though there would still be room for timber and other uses. The main obstacle to this was that Congress didn’t allow the agencies to charge for most recreation.

That began to change in 1996 when Congress created the Recreation Fee Demonstration program, allowing each of the four main public land agencies (Forest Service, Park Service, BLM, and Fish & Wildlife Service) to begin up to 100 experiments with recreation fees each and letting the agencies keep the revenues. The Park Service approached this with a complete lack of innovation, instead merely increasing entrance fees on 100 parks that were already charging fees and keeping the increased income (the fees that were previously being collected went into the Land & Water Conservation Fund). Continue reading →