Highway Despotism: A Libertarian Look at Traffic Cops

...The policy was issued as an edict which most of us grudgingly accept as yet another aspect of the system over which we have no control...

...In at least one major recent instance, though, public policy has managed the reverse of internalizing the cost of unsafe behavior...

...Was my mother a drudge in subordination to the "master group" ? No more a drudge than my father who used to come home with hands and feet blistered from his job as a presser...

...Most of what we use as consumers belongs to us as a consequence of some market transaction, but not roads...

...We are beset with something domestically that is the analogue of what, with mixed success, we have been opposing internationally for a quarter century...

...As Professor Sam Peltzman has shown in a recent article in the Journal of Political Economy, the requirements of seat belts, impactabsorbing bumpers, and other federally-mandated safety devices cause motorists to drive more aggressively, to have more accidents, and to inflict proportionally more damage on pedestrians and property than on themselves...

...This method of allocation, however, entails split-second decision-making which must inevitably be erroneous on many occasions...

...The rules are so numerous that inevitably they are violated continually...

...we have no alternative to the system...

...No doubt the policing establishment would fight the proposal, but inept policies invariably generate their own support for continuance...

...The establishment becomes as self-perpetuating as the Gulag Archipelago, and the public accepts it with the same resignation that the Soviet citizen accepts Communism: "It is the only way...

...We don't lay out a fee for the use of any given thoroughfare...

...Something as simple as a property right in a camera gave him partial escape from a repressive system...

...There is nothing in the framework of traffic policy which encourages anybody to seek an optimum between costs and beneGeorge IV...

...Because this is a nonpecuniary transaction, it is necessarily crude and unsads factory, but it does accog,plish what sensible public policy attempts to do: it internalizes the cost of undesirable behavior to the person who commits it...

...All of the foregoing squares with the Soviet citizen's evaluation of the legal framework facing him...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976 15 fits...

...Efforts at making traffic enforcement much different from what it is are frustrated by the fact that the system's very existence tends to attract people who like to dominate their fellow man...

...Adding such a nonprice restriction to the rise in the pump price of gasoline reduces the elasticity of demand for gasoline, and helps to stabilize the oil cartel...

...The 55-mile-per-hour speed limit is widely looked upon as a foolish idea...

...Yet another analogy is the incentive in traffic enforcement to use electronic snooping devices...

...Economists have widely pointed out that the present system of paying for roads with an excise on gasoline gives no adequate disincentive to driving in rush hours...

...What implications follow from these considerations for policy toward roads...

...The net effect is to give most of us criminal records with respect to roads, but not otherwise...

...Ordinary property rights and civil liberties protect one's house or one's phone conversations from being bugged without a warrant, but orte is regularly exposed to radar surveillance on the highways to ascertain how one is using the communal resource of roads...

...But the stated goal of our traffic policy--which is usually to minimize deaths in traffic accidents-simply doesn't stand scrutiny...

...The high rate at which we kill one another off on the highways could be interpreted as a demonstration that flashing lights and screaming sirens are the wrong way of going at the problem, but the death rate is invariably cited as a justification for more expenditures on policing...

...And I believe, indeed know, that they weren't unique, there were thousands of other such families in the neighborhoods in which we lived...

...We actually pay for roads with the time we waste in the queues on them...

...His property rights are limited to a bare set of personal possessions...

...This logic doesn't apply to limited-access roads, however, which could be in the private sector...

...Under the circumstances, there is inevitably a considerable random element in law enforcement: the typical driver gets arrested for what he does all the time and what he sees his fellow drivers doing continually...

...I never would have thought to ask, but now, in the shadow of decades, I should like to think that at least sometimes she was...

...So too, we spot a space in a flow of moving vehicles and try to beat other drivers to it...

...Was she a "sexual object...

...Second, adoption of price-rationing for ordinary roads would provide an advance in civil liberties, as well as in safety, allocative effciency, and the other grounds on which price-rationing is customarily advocated...

...Spectators dash for a foul ball, jumping over seats or diving down aisles until somebody takes a firm grasp on the ball, after which the other participants in the chase usually, though not invariably, observe his property right to it...

...A despotism that chooses a goal, has a compulsory ideology, and minimizes property rights has more power to oppress its citizenry than one thatdoesn't...

...Such pricing would give an incentive to fdl vehicles, for the fees could then be split among the occupants, unlike the price in time which one pays at present...

...Far from it: roads are allocated on a first-come firstserved basis like foul balls in a ball park...

...He must queue up for housing and many other goods and services that are provided on conditions of disequilibrium pricing...

...Similarly I doubt that many Americans see the elements of communal despotism in the local traffic cop, but it is there nonetheless...

...There would be no greater problem in collecting fees than in parking lots...

...For present purposes, Vickrey's proposal would greatly reduce the queuing on roads, and otherwise get rid of the excess demand in peak periods...

...Professor William Vickrey of Columbia University has recommended for some years a metering system whereby wires in the streets would activate meters in the automobiles, allowing variation of the user charges by place, hour, and direction of use of the streets...

...In lieu of stop signs, therefore, some owners of parking lots provide humps in the pavement Called speed arresters...

...I doubt that many American spectators thought of the play in those terms...

...Similarly, variable user charges would give an incentive to make trips in off hours, to stay out of central business districts entirely if one had no business there, to live closer to one's work, to use transit for work trips, to avoid redundant trips, and otherwise to economize on road use...

...Rather, roads are owned communally, and though the government charges us for using them, it is a flat excise on gasoline so small relative to the total cost of running an automobile that we act essentially as if roads were free...

...Howe's vision is clear...

...Even if minimization of deaths is taken as the appropriate goat, the institutional literature of traffic safety demonstrates that policing is the most costly way of achieving it...

...This would make them much safer, and reduce the justification for much of the policing which presently exists...

...Anyone who wants to take one of them at full speed may do so if he is willing to absorb the damage to his vehicle that the process will entail...

...Most drivers face this, and make no effort to fight conviction...

...The considerations here argue that private property rights are a protection against a despotic system...

...I f the government were trying to minimize deaths, it would simply prohibit automotive transportation...

...Precisely how they'd offer these services I don't know--and there is no reason why I should know...

...Finally, what implications follow from this analysis regarding despotisms...

...In general, there is no legal standing to the parking stalls, directional arrows, and stop signs in parking lots...

...Vickrey's system would also permit criteria for additional road investment analogous to calculations of marginal and average cost in the private sector of the economy...

...Because the system involves queuing, as most forms of nonprice allocation do, many of the rules are directives for queuing behavior: observance of red lights, stop signs, and the like...

...The random element in law enforcement threatens him with the Gulag Archipelago, however, rather than a trip to the traffic court...

...This creates a chronic anxiety as to when the police are about to descend, a fear they'll do so when one hasn't committed any offense, and an ethic of simply doing whatever one thinks he can get away with on the basis of his best guess as to what the police are likely to find out...

...As a consequence, the average load in rush-hour vehicles falls lower and lower as our incomes increase...

...First, some roads could be turned over to the private sector...

...Among the bundle of services which the entrepreneurs would offer would be superior safety and superior civil liberties relative to unlimited-access roads...

...The road irrrms' effort at dealing with these problems is the sort of innovation in response to market incentives that we want the private sector to provide...

...The protagonist, Styles, is a black photographer who escaped the repression of apartheid by converting his hobby of outdoor photography into a business Of portrait photography in Port Elizabeth...

...The present system of traffic law enforcement seeks to accomplish the same thing with a set of criminal penalties...

...It must be perfected and made more humane...

...It is a view that the meaning of life ha, little to do with loveless couplings in decaying restrooms but that it has much--everything--to do with giving, sympathizing, and controlling, with the mystical complementariness of male and female...

...Rather, he presumes that one was using the road for some illicit purpose, and he looks for evidence of a stolen car, violation of liquor or narcotics statutes, flight from prosecution, or other crimes, Traffic courts have a nominal presumption of innocence, but the justice is mainly on a level of if-you-were-arrested-you-did-it...

...Hilton, professor of economics at UCLA, is an expert on transportation policy...

...The traffic cop makes no presumption that one was using the road in the public interest...

...His behavior is circumscribed by rules which entail no presumption of an invisible hand...

...This is a method of paying which gives us no incentive to fill vehicles: we pay the same price whether we drive alone or in a full car...

...The rest are mainly restrictions on one' s use of the space in the flow of vehicles: speed limits, requirements for use of turn signals, permitted characteristics of the vehicle, and so on...

...To be consistent, we should try to get rid of it domestically as thoroughly as possible...

...The current play, Sizwe Banzi is Dead, portrays the adaptation of black South Afi:icans to a system which is despotic to them...

...One humble example illustrates the private sector's ability to do in a nondespotic fashion what the traffic police can do only with penalties...

...It doesn't do so, obviously, because there are countervailing benefits...

...Hilton Highway Despotism: A Libertariau Look at Traffic Cops The enforcement of AmerCcan traffic regulations is in some ways as despotic as life in the Soviet Union, In the unlikely event that the reader seeks a sample of life in a Communist society, let him consider his relations with the traffic cop...

...It will be the thesis of this short polemic that traffic law enforcement produces most of what is most repellent in Soviet society because of a common bond--the absence of property rights...

...In general, everybody else observes our rights to the position in traffic we have established, and no one bashes into us intentionally...

...In both cases the situation produces a feeling of powerlessness...

...In the 1960s, the District of Columbia traffic authorities undertook a study of driver behavior and concluded that a typical driver violated a traffic rule every 30 seconds...

...Once again, this squares with Soviet society...

...When the police do descend, there is none of Adam Smith's invisible hand...

...brilliant Harper's review of (bisexual) Kate MiUett's feminist screed, Sexual Politics, Irving Howe talks about his own family: I recall my mother and father sharing their years in trouble and affection, meeting together the bitterness of sudden poverty during the Depression, both of them working for wretched wages in the stinking garment center, helping one another, in the shop, on the subways, at home, through dreadful years...

...As in Soviet society, the authorities choose a goal and force us to accept it...

...George Irl...

...The tawdriness of "homosexual liberation"--and of its brothers under the skin on the magazine rack--can blind us to the true gaiety of the nuptial relationship of man and woman which has endured throughout so many millennia of poverty and sorrow, of affluence and joy...

...The parallel dosn't end with that...

...16 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1976...

...The logic of having government build and allocate roads is based on the presumption that it is so easy to get on and off them that private persons could not price the service...

...Because of the risks involved, the process of allocation is circumscribed by a vast lmmber of rules for dealing with the resource...