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Tag privatization

Private Streets in Brooklyn?

This isn’t some crazy proposal, they have been private since the 20’s and 30’s. It seems there are advantages and disadvantages. You don’t have to worry about street parking when you own the street, but you have to hire your own contractor to make repairs. My main concern is that those homeowners are still paying taxes, but not benefiting from public services. From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle – Community Board 10 Meeting Sparks New Effort to Solve Cul-de-sac Problems: The 19 private unmapped streets in Bay Ridge are now a public matter as nearly a hundred residents of these cul-de-sac havens came together at a Community Board 10 meeting to learn how they can get city services that they pay for in taxes but don’t get. It would be interesting to see what would happen with more private streets.

Privatize Midway Airport

If Chicago’s Midway Airport is privatized, I’ll be looking forward to flying in there. (And it won’t just be to satisfy cravings of Italian beef sandwiches and hot dogs at the food court.) It’s success may depend on the how much (or hopefully how little) the city regulates the airport’s contracts and operations as well as how much wasteful patronage will be eliminated by the private operator. From Reason.org‘s Out of Control Blog: Leasing Chicago’s Midway Airport If there was any question whether investors would be interested in a long-term lease of Chicago’s Midway Airport, it was answered in the affirmative at the beginning of April. If Midway does generate significant value for the city, the lease could be as precedent-setting as the city’s January 2005 lease of the Chicago Skyway. That transaction focused global attention on the United States as a new market for privatization of toll roads. But for the same thing to be possible in the airport sector would require Congress to amend the Airport Privatization Pilot Program legislation it enacted in 1996 . If it is as successful as the Skyway lease, it could usher in a wave of privatization of airports and highways across the US as governments try to shore up their budgets.

McCain: Suspend the Gas Tax and Inflate the Deficit

I favor Bob Poole’s solution: “The longer-term solution is to scrap the 20th-century tax-and-grant system in favor of universal tolling, managed by each state’s Department of Transportation and private toll companies.” Furthermore, get the federal government out of the business of subsidizing highways altogether and allow the states to privatize them. It would shift the cost closer to home and drastically reduce pork. More: Greg Mankiw’s Blog: Bad News for the Pigou Club

Government Planning Day

The Antiplanner discusses how well-intentioned agencies become wasteful government-planning bureaucracies. The mal-investment in our socialist highway system and the resulting congestion, pollution, disrepair, and sprawl come to mind. Using smart growth, modern day planners are trying to correct the lack of foresight of the planners and politicians of past generations who brought us the sprawl and congestion in the first place. However, with the lack of signals the market give us, it took several generations to recognize we had been going the wrong direction. We won’t know for another generation or two which wrong road modern planners are sending us down. Even if it’s unlikely we can privatize everything overnight, by introducing market solutions to our highway/transit systems, we can begin to make better decisions for the long run. Politicians need to welcome the ideas of tolling and privatization and stop pandering to the automobile-reliant voters.

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