Cordato agrees that there is an automobile problem. Roads are under- and overused, and cars cause damages for which victims are not compensated. He points to the interstate highway system as an example: "So much of it is just a waste of concrete. You've got miles and miles of super-highway that is empty most of the time." His solution is to take planning out of the hands of the inept government, privatize the roads and have operators charge people to drive on them, which is abhorrent to anti-car activists. Privatization would take politics out of transit choices and leave them up to the consumer, not the lobbyists. Costly, unprofitable enterprises like unused highways, subways, and light rail likely would go bankrupt. Private bus companies would flourish--not a bright prospect for those who want to lessen or even eradicate car use.
For Cordato, central planners and the government can never respond to demand as well as the market, in which millions of individuals make specific economic decisions in incredibly varied situations. When a central authority tries to determine what all these individuals need, then allocate resources and charge fees accordingly, he warns others to be on the lookout for bread-roll soccer balls.
Even if planners could determine what needed to go where and when, special interests would tear their designs apart. Libertarians fear that when you couple these tendencies with the coercive power of the government--eminent domain in the field of town and transportation planning--you have disaster: Just look at the highways that roll through uninhabited ranch lands or have decimated the urban fabric, ripping through neighborhoods in the face of local opposition.
But if roads were privatized, Cordato argues, people would get what they demand. Privatization also would go further in solving the problem of external costs that concern anti-car activists. Whereas now it is virtually impossible to sue the government for pollution caused by the use of its roadways, private companies would not enjoy the government's luxury of "sovereign immunity" and would have to take issues of harm into account when they plan the construction and operation of roads. If too many people are able to sue a company for the pollution and noise that accompanies the superhighway planned for their backyard, the company probably won't build it.
What the issue comes down to for libertarians is individual freedom as opposed to the coercive nature of centralized planning. We simply can't know if society will be "better off" with reduced car use unless we claim to know what is good for all individuals and force that "good" upon them. Only the free market can give individuals what they want without forcing them to comply with the vision of a few far-away planners, argue those who oppose regulating car use.
"Freedom is the one value that allows other values to flourish," Cordato says. This, he reiterates, is the nut of the debate, something either dismissed or not discussed in anti-car literature. "I want people to get what they want," he says, with the usual caveat of not allowing the coercion of others. But the anti-car activists, he claims, don't seem to want that.
Americans have a history of revolting against what Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, called the centralized city planning of "high-minded social thinkers." This April, residents of San Francisco, home of the first American highway revolt in 1959, tore down some of the elevated highway built across busy Market Street. The lesson seems clear: Far-away authorities and social engineers have no business determining local issues. Are anti-car advocates following the central planning footsteps of the highway builders of yore? If so, the revolutionary visions of the movement could simply lead to more rebellion. In our culture of freedom and choice, utopia may have to be won one driver at a time.
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