SOME PERSPECTIVE ON TREATING ROADS AS PRODUCTIVE ASSETS.

A contributor to Freewheeling opens with a trenchant observation, just a little too long for a pithy short take.

What connects drinking water, food, housing and fuel for heating and cooking? Answer: they are all absolutely essential for survival, yet we (as society) are happy for them to be chargeable according to the amount you use.

Indeed, as a society, we’re happy for almost everything to be chargeable according to the amount you use. Like most societies globally, we’ve found that payment is by far the most efficient way of allocating resources. In order to avoid grotesque inequalities, we then apply a tax and benefit system to ensure that everyone has at least some cash with which to pay for all this stuff.

Nitpick if you wish, that might be something for another day (or a full course in political economy), then enjoy where he goes.

In the 18th and early 19th century, roads were dominant and were tolled.

In the late 19th century, railways were dominant and roads were free.

In the 20th century and early 21st century, roads were dominant and charged fuel tax.

If we do nothing, in the late 21st century roads will be dominant and entirely free.

Is that really what we want?

He's writing from the United Kingdom, where that fuel tax is high enough to induce substitutions to rail in a way that would be politically deadly in North America, and those late 21st century roads will be "entirely free" provided electric automobiles make avoiding the fuel tax feasible.

It's not an outcome he desires, completely without any argument that roads ought be treated as productive assets.