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Thoughts on The Power Broker and Government Roads
I recently finished The Power Broker by Robert Caro after many months of Metro reading. I loved the book, and can’t recommend it enough. Caro provides an overview of Robert Moses’ policies here. If you don’t want to invest in reading the full 1162 pages, I would particularly recommend the chapters that explain the impacts of Robert Moses’ policies on what were cohesive neighborhoods: “Changing,” “One Mile,” and “Rumors and the Report of Rumors.” While reading The Power Broker, I was repeatedly reminded of the massive coercion involved in road building despite the commonly held belief among many advocates of limited government that road provision is one of the least offensive government practices. Oftentimes the small government tolerance of road building seems to stem from the relatively small subsidies that roads require. Randal O’Toole has often demonstrated that automobile travel is cheaper per passenger mile than mass transit and that the bulk of these costs are born by drivers. While he advocates moving to a vehicle mile tax that would more closely tie road costs to their users and allow for the devolution of transit funding, he does not challenge that road building is a legitimate state and local government function. However, as Stephen, Adam and others have previously pointed out, these accounting costs of road building don’t take into consideration the opportunity cost of the land dedicated to roads, which in areas with high real estate prices is considerable. Moses notoriously bulldozed valuable developments for highways and while he made operating profits on tolls, he put land to lower value use in the process. For example, Moses used eminent domain and government funds to transform what was once a privately operated elevated rail system into an elevated highway on Brooklyn’s Third Avenue, destroying property values and a neighborhood in the process. We have no way of […]
