A LEGACY OF RENT-SEEKING.

Reason's Robert Poole asks, "Why Can't You Buy a Starbucks on the Interstate?"  You can, on some interstate highways in Illinois and Ohio, if you know where to look, but in North Platte, Nebraska, you have to go into town (and it's the only one along Interstate 80 in several hundred miles, and the locals are savvy enough to 'phone in their orders.)

Along the tollways and turnpikes, the service plazas are excellent venues for rent-seeking.  A different sort of rent-seeking accompanied the "freeways."

If your travels have included toll roads, you may wonder why 95 percent of all Interstate miles don't have service plazas like the turnpikes. The answer is that it's against federal law. Back in 1960, when the first Interstates were being built, gas station and restaurant owners along the old highways––like U.S. 66 and U.S. 41, which went right through towns and cities—feared bankruptcy because the Interstates bypassed all those towns. So they lobbied Congress to forbid service plazas on the new Interstates. This gave them the chance to stay in business by building new gas stations and fast-food outlets clustered around Interstate offramps. The fledgling truck stop industry allied itself with the small-town merchants, and built their truck stops as near as they could to Interstate offramps.

The piss-poor rent seeker would grouse about having a parcel of land taken by eminent domain. The clever rent-seeker would figure out where the interchanges were going, and buy parcels of land to be taken and adjacent parcels to build on.

Writers at Reason often carry lug wrenches for the highway lobby, although sometimes they recognize that the roads are productive assets that should be priced accordingly.

A new Reason Foundation study says it's time for the federal ban to be junked. It discusses both the truck parking shortage and the need for convenient E.V. charging stations as the rationale, and it's part of the Foundation's vision of a second-generation Interstate highway system, run mostly as toll roads with first-class commercial service plazas. But before we can even get to the question of toll-financing the rebuilt Interstates, the 61-year-old ban has to go.

It's a curious coalition of rent-seekers who want to preserve that ban.

Fighting back will be the National Association of Truck Stop Operators (NATSO), which has successfully defeated previous bills to repeal the ban. Those bills have been desired by state transportation agencies that have no revenue source to maintain their rest areas (which provide only restrooms, vending machines, and a modest amount of parking). Historically, most of the trucking organizations have sided with NATSO, but the owners/operators are already on board for repeal.

Commercialization could actually turn out to be a win-win for truck stops, since they would be in a good position to bid for public-private partnerships offered by state departments of transportation to develop and operate new service plazas, some of which might be truck-only.

Why aren't the truck-stop operators lining up to get contracts to convert the existing rest areas (and truck pull-off lots) into service plazas?