When it comes to commercial areas, businesses will likely build and maintain roads leading to their physical location and probably won’t charge for their use. It will be considred part of hte cost of doing business, much like their private parking lots currently are.
Like Blade Runner.. Cool…
Our understanding of “the laws of physics” have in older days told us that we couldn’t fly, couldn’t break the speed barrier, couldn’t carry a human out of Earth’s gravity without killing them, couldn’t travel to the moon and back, and for a long time couldn’t make a computer that weighed less than a couple of tons. Now it tells us (or at least you) that we’ll never make an engine that doesn’t waste almost all of the kinetic energy it generates.
I point to the fact that the market in the West is hindered as much today as it ever has been, with the partial exception of the Industrial Revolution. Without the state actively preventing it, who says another technological revolution isn’t just around the corner? There’s a lot of potential economic profit in moving transportation off the ground. It’s getting crowded down here.
We can fly. It’s just not practical to do so below a certain scale of travel.
That’s true of any means of transportation. For trips under 5 minutes, it’s not practical to drive either. People walk instead.
You’re missing the point. Every technology we have besides manual labor was impractical at one point. The airplane, the automobile and the microchip were all met by “experts” with the attitude of “okay, but what’s it good for?” Good thing the experts don’t run the show, eh?
Heck, many of the farmers in the industrial era thought that machines that did the plowing, planting and harvesting were for lazy men. Guess it’s a good thing a few of them saw a potential for profit in the new novelties.
Do you really believe that a hundred years from now we’ll still be rolling along asphalt strips in machines that only use 20-something percent of their power? I think that’s ridiculous. Someone will build a better mousetrap.
I believe that a hundred years from now we will be rolling along some advanced material strips in machines that weigh barely anything and use their power with amazing efficiency. This is easy to predict because this is what has happened for the past 2000 years.
The tens of thousands of years of analog technology utterly failed to predict the digital age. Precident means nothing.
Even roads with market prices cost something. It stands to reason that if we have these incredibly efficient engines, which will instantly solve the problem that makes flight untenable for everyday transportation, roadless mobility will be less costly than the maintanence of roads. Probably not immediately, but there was a 50-year overlap from the invention of the horseless carriage to the obsolescence of the horse-and-carriage. And once they become common, who woudn’t want to own a flying car?
Whether or not it’s practical won’t mean any more than the practicality of automobiles did to teenagers who had no further than a few miles to travel in a day. If there was economic profit in providing cheap automobiles to small-town teenagers who sure as heck didn’t need them, there will be economic profit in selling flying cars to anyone who wants them. What the early automobile gave the common person was the chance to go really fast; it didn’t become practically necessary until later. Flying cars will give the common person the chance to fly, and then roads will go out of style.
I’d ask you to bet on it, but I don’t think I’ll live that long. I’d bet my kids will, though.
That was funny, I’d seen it before. But I hope you realize those guys (not their charicatures, the real ones) represent established interests who benefit a great deal from the state squelching innovation.
Everybody’s clueless - if anyone knew how things would be done under a free market (by means other than living in one), he’d make a good dictator, being able to plan things properly and all [:)]
(Another possibility: the price of permanent “connection” to a road could simply be priced in to land sales…)
That would not work, as it would mean that the road wouldn’t be repaired over time.
It shouldn’t make any difference whether you pay a subscription of, say, $1000 per year every year or the present value of $1000/yr-in-perpetuity - call it $20000 - all at once.
It does make a difference, much like it makes a difference for an employee’s annual salary not to be paid as a lump sum in his first week.
If you like, pay the money to a third party who can dole out $1000/yr/customer, or whatever.
I can no longer understand what the point of doing this would be.
With regards to technology being restrained by governments and special interests, watch the documentary “Who killed the electric car”
My thoughts:
Virtual Reality and other information technologies will render physical transportation useless in about 20 - 30 years, so don’t get your hopes up about improvements to automobile engines, etc. We’ll sooner see desktop factories that can manufacture all the objects you need to get in the full-immersion VR world. I suggest checking out Kurzweil’s Singularity is Near or Drexler’s Engines of Creation. In fact, once you can define your “soul” in pure information, there would be relatively little need to physically transport it.
Anyway, in Canada there’s a private toll road that simply takes a picture of your license plate as you drive over it, and it sends you a bill. Private tollways don’t need to rely on license plates. They could use RFID, etc, to toll traffic without causing congestion.
Homesteading and private roads go hand in hand. If you have not already, read about the Least Technologic Unit, which is the homesteading concept Rothbard suggests. This would ensure roads are not unreasonably large (like they are now - guess they are contracted by lb of concrete!), so that competition has available resources. It also ensures that roads cannot extend upwards forever, which would for no good reason prevent competitors from crossing whatever 2 dimensional geometry existing roads were placed. This would allow competing roadways to be built above existing ones (although naming the grounded road the “scenic” route might prevent this - very difficult circumstances do arise).
New technology would definitely come quick. Types of vision systems that could direct traffic based upon need rather than timings (like cops often do during busy events) would become commonplace (rather than cameras designed to fine you for barely running a red light). An improvement I would expect to see would be a surveillance system, so that fault for accidents could be easily demonstrated through video.
Legally, private roads present interesting scenarios. The risk management that the state does would be now legitimate (I consider violations of liberty for risk management on public grounds immoral - licenses and traffic fines have no place unless you actually cause harm to some other driver). Private roads can be licensed differently, carry different speed limits, have these regulations enforced differently…this would allow diversity in driving conditions aligned to market demand…and could reform our ridiculous drunk driving laws - yes, there may be an option to get a drunk license.
The best reason to suggest private roads is that roads would be focused on the two objectives they should have (besides the obvious one of getting from point a to point b): lack of congestion and safety. The fastest and safest roads would be the most rewarded by the market (provided they connect at least two useful destinations).
And yes, zoning laws and other property regulation are a large means of preventing competition. Consider Disney, which has a monorail running through resort buildings. Why couldn’t there be elevated roadways extending between buildings in urban areas? There’s plenty of sky to make use of, even if the ground is already congested.
I love gmail. Just as I was reading your post through my gmail client, at the top appears a link called “IT in 2018” (because google looks for search items in your mail to pick up relevant data). It’s a pretty good read:
http://solutions.internet.com/index.php/4746_default/cb786e3b7e1ebc781fa9de5543ae8a47
Sweet - will definitely check it out
It largely depends on what one is trying to be “efficient” with. Efficient with fuel to mileage or fuel to power or fuel to longevity or weight to mileage or size to power… etc.
The I.C.E. loses much of its energy through heat, but that heat is harnessed in the heater in the winter, and is being used in some prototype cars to generate electricity to replace the alternator. In addition, the combustion engine is capable of making tons of power much easier and with fewer inconveniences than electric motors or the like. Building a small block chevy that can run the quarter in around 12 seconds? easy. Electric motor? difficult.
I feel it bears pointing out that the internal combustion engine, like most every other technology, is being severely hampered by government intervention as well, despite its seeming advancement. The amount of work arounds and technology devoted to merely getting through the emissions controls and government imposed 'safety’s is ridiculous. Such inventions as using intermittent steam power in diesel engines and the like are going to go through ears of testing and crap before they ever enter the market. Removing much of this crap from your engine will free up power and fuel mileage. The amount of protection of domestic businesses, and the cartelization of ideas and technology through IP and corporate handout and protection only serve to stifle creativity, advancement, and competition for the better - faster - stronger. How long did it take before we had the engine that could effectively reduce the number of operating pistons from 8 or so to 6 or 4 on demand?
Of course I happen to like the combustion engine though as it makes power easy and I happen to enjoy drag racing.
That being said however, I think it IS often overlooked that roads being subsidized means that ONLY cars are being produced as any peripheral like a road that would be needed would be impossible to convince people to finance. If you think about it, I would venture to say that modes of personal transportation have become DEPENDANT upon roads because of government construction and subsidy of them. Without such, would the car and truck have become better off-road, dirt road vehicles? Certainly the Model T was made with plenty of ground clearance before roads became the fetish of state apologists. Do people even WANT roads? If roads are privately provided in a free market, and not built, that can only really mean one thing: there is not sufficient demand for the road. I remember reading about Somalias road production dropping since the collapse of their democracy and if people do not choose to spend their moneys on roads, then why should they be forced to?
for the OP:
heres some stuff by Block on the subject of roads:
there is also a chapter or two where roads are discussed in Murray Rothbard’s “For a New Liberty”