The United States federal government should close the United States Department of Transportation
Download 1.4 Mb.
|
CP Solves – CongestionFederal control guarantees congestion, which drains economic productive -- market strategies solve.Block, 9 – PhD in economics from Columbia, Harold E. Wirth Endowed Chair in Economics at Loyola University (Walter, “Privatization of Roads and Highways”, Ludvig von Mises Institute, 2009, http://library.mises.org/books/Walter%20Block/The%20Privatization%20of%20Roads%20and%20Highways.pdf)//RI Another major concern about the public highway system is the massive congestion in and around many of the urban areas during rush-hour periods. This not only leads to aggravation and waste of gas while idling in traffic but also constitutes an immense loss of time and productivity. According to Representative Thomas Petri, chairman in the 104th Congress of the House Sur- face Transportation Subcommittee, if each Federal Express and United Parcel Service driver encounters traffic delays for five minutes in a day, the cost mounts to $40 million over the course of a year. Multiplying this by all U.S. drivers gives some rough indicator of the cost to society. The government has come up with ways to address the traffic problem, but none has worked. For example, the federal government has called for employers to stagger work hours for their employees so that the traffic coming into urban areas would be spread out more. In some states, special lanes for high-occupancy vehicles have been constructed at great expense. For many driv- ers, the inconvenience or impracticality of carpooling overrides the benefit of such a contrivance. Owners of private highways would undoubtedly offer cheaper rates at off-peak times, thus providing a monetary incentive for staggered work hours. With today’s highways, govern- ments, too, could employ such a procedure. But instead of charging more for peak-load travelers, the state usually charges less. It is common to reduce the price for regular commuters who pur- chase tokens for forty or more trips a month. These are precisely the peak-load users who add to the congestion. Other solutions the government has come up with are one- way streets and limited turns in busy areas. While these are intended to cut down on traffic, the secondary effects are often the opposite. The restrictions may necessitate circuitous routes and drivers may end up driving more. This increases the amount of miles driven in certain areas within a constrained time period. Under private ownership, the builder of a road would want to secure the highest profits with the least cost. The builder would consider the businesses and residents located near the highway. A system where the transportation owners worked cooperatively with industry and residents would encourage efficiency as well as profits for the road owner. The owner of a private highway would need to satisfy the customer in order to make profits. The governmental (public) owner of the highway, the politician, is usually able to give the customer poor service and does not need to satisfy the voter in order to receive money. If the public enterprise is sued for negligence, the person in charge does not directly pay; all monies come out of general tax revenues. In the case of private owner- ship, the owner must pay. Thus there are much higher incentives for the private owner to provide good service. Switch of the highways to the private sector solves HOT highways -- that solves congestion. Roth 10—civil engineer, transportation economist, research fellow at the Independent Institute (Gabriel, Federal Highway Funding, CATO Institute, June 2010, http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/transportation/highway-funding)//EM One of the promising advances to relieving urban congestion is High-Occupancy or Toll (HOT) highways. Networks of HOT lanes can be structured for use by vehicles with payment of variable tolls combined with buses at no charge. The tolls are collected electronically and set at levels high enough to ensure acceptable traffic conditions at all times. A current obstacle to expanding HOT lane programs is that it is difficult to add tolls to roads constructed with federal funds. The first HOT lanes in the United States were introduced in 1995 on California's State Route 91 near Anaheim. The California Private Transportation Company conceived, designed, financed, constructed, and opened two pairs of "express lanes" in the median of a 10-mile stretch of the highway.40 Express lane users pay tolls by means of identifiers, similar to those used by EZPass systems, with the payments debited electronically from accounts opened with the company. Following the lead of the private sector, California's public sector implemented a similar project on Route I-15 north of San Diego. It has also proven popular. The rates charged on the I-15 lanes are varied automatically in real time to respond to traffic conditions. HOT lanes have also been implemented in Denver and Minneapolis, and are planned for the Washington, D.C., area. Payments for the use of roads can now be made as easily as payments for the use of telephones, without vehicles having to stop. Such changes in payment methods can have profound effects on the management and financing of roads. If the federal government removed itself from highway financing, direct payments for road use could be made directly to state governments through tolls. These sorts of tolls are already in place in New York and New Jersey. An even better solution would be payment of tolls for road use directly to private highway companies, which would cut out government financing completely. This is now technically feasible. More ev -- privatization solves congestion best. Edwards 9 director of tax policy studies at Cato, top expert on federal and state tax and budget issues (Chris, “Privatization,” February 2009, http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/privatization)//AM Any service that can be supported by consumer fees can be privatized. A big advantage of privatized airports, air traffic control, highways, and other activities is that private companies can freely tap debt and equity markets for capital expansion to meet rising demand. By contrast, modernization of government infrastructure is subject to the politics and uncertainties of government budgeting processes. As a consequence, government infrastructure is often old, congested, and poorly maintained. Air Traffic Control. The Federal Aviation Administration has been mismanaged for decades and provides Americans with second-rate air traffic control. The FAA has struggled to expand capacity and modernize its technology, and its upgrade efforts have often fallen behind schedule and gone over budget. For example, the Government Accountability Office found one FAA technology upgrade project that was started in 1983 and was to be completed by 1996 for $2.5 billion, but the project was years late and ended up costing $7.6 billion. The GAO has had the FAA on its watch list of wasteful "high-risk" agencies for years. Air traffic control (ATC) is far too important for such government mismanagement and should be privatized. The good news is that a number of countries have privatized their ATC and provide good models for U.S. reforms. Canada privatized its ATC system in 1996. It set up a private, nonprofit ATC corporation, Nav Canada, which is self-supporting from charges on aviation users. The Canadian system has received high marks for sound finances, solid management, and investment in new technologies. Highways. A number of states are moving ahead with privately financed and operated highways. The Dulles Greenway in Northern Virginia is a 14-mile private highway opened in 1995 that was financed by private bond and equity issues. In the same region, Fluor-Transurban is building and mainly funding high-occupancy toll lanes on a 14-mile stretch of the Capital Beltway. Drivers will pay to use the lanes with electronic tolling, which will recoup the company's roughly $1 billion investment. Fluor-Transurban is also financing and building toll lanes running south from Washington along Interstate 95. Similar private highway projects have been completed, or are being pursued, in California, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. Private-sector highway funding and operation can help pave the way toward reducing the nation's traffic congestion. Public transportation will increase congestion -- they measure productivity by ridership not by efficiency. O'Toole 12—senior fellow at the Cato Institute (Randal, “DOT Moves to Support Even More Wasteful Transit Projects”, Cato Institute, 3/20, http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/dot-moves-support-even-more-wasteful-transit-projects)//EM Moreover, instead of measuring cost effectiveness by the number of hours of time the projects save travelers, the proposed rules would measure it by the number of new transit riders the project is projected to gain. This means that projects that increase congestion (by, for example, building streetcar lines in streets or running frequent trains across grade crossings), wasting most people’s time, will actually score higher because planning models assume congestion leads more people to ride transit. Federal planners have an incentive to increase highway congestion -- this backfires and increases pollution. O’Toole, 6-- director of the Thoreau Institute and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute (Randal, “A Desire Named Streetcar How Federal Subsidies Encourage Wasteful Local Transit Systems”, Cato Policy Analysis, 1/5, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa559.pdf)//EM To the EPA and many urban planners, relieving congestion simply encourages more driving. So they prefer to focus on high-cost transit improvements and hope that increased congestion will convince some drivers to take transit. Portland’s regional planning agency, for example, wrote in its transportation plans that “congestion signals positive urban development” and that “transportation solutions aimed solely at relieving congestion are inappropriate” because they “would eliminate transit ridership.”74 The Twin Cities’ agency decided to limit construction of new highways in the hope that “as traffic congestion builds, alternative travel modes will become more attractive.”75Unfortunately, the air pollution models endorsed by the EPA and the Department of Transportation failed to account for the added pollution caused by congestion— and thus failed to credit any air quality benefits to congestion relief.76 Privatization solves congestion. Samuel, 95—freelance journalist who writes on regulatory affairs and whose work appears in Forbes and National Review (Peter, “Highway Aggravation: The Case For Privatizing The Highways”, Cato Policy Analysis, 6/27, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-231.html)//EM Two leading transport economists recently wrote, "Traffic congestion is a classic externality, especially pervasive and important in urban areas. The theoretical and empirical relationships governing it have been thoroughly studied. As a result there is a consensus among urban economists, and a growing proportion of other urban and transportation analysts, as to the first-best policies to deal with it: namely some form of (anti-) congestion pricing. Disagreement centers on the practicability and political feasibility."(39) There is legitimate resistance to tolls if they are seen as just another way to raise money. There is potentially a large amount of money in highway tolls. Kenneth Small of the University of California, Irvine, estimates that there is at least as much in congestion pricing revenues as in congestion costs--around $50 billion a year, just about enough to offset the $40 billion raised in federal and state gasoline and diesel fuel taxes and the $10 billion in state registration revenues.(40) Small makes an interesting case for deploying congestion tolls in a package that would compensate losers, finance alternative peak-hour transit, and generally smooth the way politically for reform. John Kain of Harvard sees the perception of tolls as taxes as the overwhelming obstacle. "This obstacle to congestion pricing ought to be removed by returning all congestion price revenues, net of collection costs, to taxpayers in the form of a highly visible tax rebate."(41) Another way to achieve that result would be for governments to progressively privatize their highways, phase down their gas tax and registration fees, and phase out their highway departments. That could be done in many different ways: by calling for bids, by putting sections of highway up for sale, by selling conditional franchises to build and operate. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 1.4 Mb. Share with your friends:
|