The Road Less Traveled Is Private and Expensive

Re “Privatize Roads to Ease Clogging,” Voices, Aug. 10: We have already paid for the clogged highways through gas taxes and other taxes, and now Adam Summers wants us to pay again through toll roads. I think only one of his ideas, about the gas tax, is good--that way the ones who use the roads the most will pay the most. As to his other idea of paying a toll, it will really be nice when only the rich can visit their relatives on holidays and the rest of us will have to stay home and enjoy ourselves alone.

There are certain things that the private sector should not control, and the highways are just one. Haven’t we learned anything from the electrical power fiasco, the natural gas fiasco and now, maybe, the water fiasco?

When Summers states that price increases would keep the optimal number of cars on the road, should we substitute “well-to-do people”?

Dennis Beito

Glendora

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Where does one begin to respond to Summers’ assertion that “the problem of traffic congestion is what economists call a tragedy-of-the-commons problem”? Where are we? In pre-Revolution France? Summers goes on to suggest that “when congestion increased because of holiday or commuter traffic, prices would increase to keep the optimal number of cars on the road and traffic moving smoothly.” Why should my Spanish-speaking gardener want to be with his family on the Fourth of July, or Labor Day, or Christmas?

Why should lower-income people get a free pass? Charge him for it, and charge him past his ability to pay! That’s the answer to the phenomenon of massive overdevelopment and imperfect planning that has congested the freeways of Los Angeles (and the rest of Southern California, a profoundly popular place to live).

And lastly, he says that “people would take alternate routes.” This could include driving through housing tracts, near schools and hospitals and the like--on a scale as yet unimagined. We already sit idly by while the plutocrats reign in Washington. Don’t let them take the roads as well.

Frank Armstrong

Los Angeles