No, you paid the city to join the neighborhood. There wouldn’t be a neighborhood if you didn’t.
The matter is replacing the city with legitimate ownership. The rents you currently pay to the city would instead go to a private owner who would have the incentive to increase supply or lower costs, which would be to your advantage.
Give each person a proportional share in the ownership of the road based upon how much they paid into the roadway system in taxes prior to privatization. If that can’t be determined, allow partial ownership based upon frontage property - but as Rich333 mentioned, easements upon usage will have already been developed by users who don’t live along the roadway, which must be considered.
In a highly competitive and regulation-free environment we would have gone to personal air travel long ago. Propeller driven aircraft are no more complex than automobiles. Infact i would assert that the anti-lock brakes and airbag sensors in most modern cars is much more technically advanced than the electronics in most personal aircraft flown today.
Growing up i had a friend who’s dad and brother were commercial airline pilots. Their family owned a number of small aircraft (including a cessna 150 and 310 iirc). Here was a family that was quite wealthy yet they were flying planes that were 30+ years old. The federal government and the FAA have all but destroyed the small plane market with the all the hoops an aircrafts companies must jump through to build a plane. Today a new “personal” aircraft will set you back a million+ yet i can buy a brand new car for 10k. Again small aircraft aren’t anymore complex than modern automobiles they are just more expensive by a factor of 100.
I remember that my friend’s dad had to replace a propeller on one of this airplanes and it baffled me what a pain it was. The bolts had to be of a special type, and then they had to thread steel wire through the bolt heads to ensure that the bolts didn’t back out. Further his propeller installation required government inspection before he could fly his own personal airplane again. Just imagine if you have to schedule and pass a government imposed inspection each time you changed the brakes on your car or changed a headlamp. The government has destroyed the personal aircraft market. This is partly why people actually build their own airplanes so they can avoid many of the government regulations.
The auto market is also burdened with substantial government regulations but they pale in comparison to what the aircraft industry faces.
Of course the nannystate supports argue that we need all this regulation to keep people “safe” so their airplanes don’t fall out of the sky. Similar arguments were make about how unsafe cars in the early days of automobiles and similar arguments were levied against AC current (vs DC current) in homes. Sure there are people who die in car accidents and get electrocuted every day yet the arguments of the nanny’s that we were all going to perish never came to pass.
Is personal airtravel more dangerous than driving automobiles at 70+ mph on narrow strips of asphalt on government run roads? In some ways yes, and in other ways the airtravel is probably safer. Like everything in life it’s a cost/benefit analysis, and i strongly suspect that if the market was able to operate free from government interference then we would have a cessna instead of a buick parked in the garage.
Interestingly, issues of congestion largely go away with air travel as it opens a 3rd dimension to spread out traffic (roads are x,y while airtravel is x,y,z axis and thus congestion between points goes down by a factor of z. Eliminating all the stop and go traffic would also be a huge fuel savings. I’m unsure what the consumption rate of fuel is for a small aircraft but i suspect that they would be more fuel efficient than our typical automobile gets today.
I seem to remember of community in Florida where the people own airplanes not automobiles. when they need to go somewhere they hop in their plane and take off.
Just imagine how much money would be saved on an annual basis if we didn’t have to spend billions of dollars building (and maintaining) roads, bridges, tunnels etc. Imagine further that this would also more evenly spread out land values as places that are difficult to drive to are much easier to fly to. Sadly this will never come to pass as government has ensured that a personal airplane is more expensive than a Ferrari.
Barring flying as a solution private ownership would work fine provided that it was a “perfectly competitive” market where anyone who wanted to enter the road business could without the government constructing lots of artificial barriers to keep competitors out (environmental/zoning/bonding/bidding/etc). I live in a city of about 200k people and the nicest “road” between my house and the local grocery store is the parking lot at the grocery store. The rest of the drive will require an off road vehcile soon because of the too-many-to-count potholes.
~don
As much as I like the Back to the Future scenario I don’t think you’ll have masses of people flying around in Cessna’s any time soon. Flying to get somewhere a few hundred miles away makes sense. Flying to go to the mall does not. And I don’t see a mass of people who want to fly themselves, but that could change. A more practical solution would be the development of better mass transit systems that can quickly move people cheaply from point A to point B. Before the city of New York took over mass transit every subway line was owned by private companies. Mass transit can come in many different forms from light rail lines to buses, subways, even a rather interesting idea of personal rapid transit. High speed trains can move people between cities whose passengers could then use other mass transit methods to move about the city.
The biggest impediment to mass transit in this country, at least in Texas, is that people don’t want it. We have a car culture wherein your car is your status symbol. Getting people to accept public transit can be difficult but it is worth it environmentally and economically.
I remember reading in some magazine a while ago that cars that can fly over short distances are already in development and scheduled for release in a few years.
There are several people working on the idea but we are still a long way off from it happening. The closest one we have to working is the Moller M400 but that has been in development for like 20 years or more and I don’t think the guy is that much closer to releasing it.
It’s more complicated than that. Mass transit is a long-range shortcut between two pedestrian paths. Pedestrian paths don’t exist in the United States outside of Manhattan, so that makes mass transit projects fairly useless.
It is much more realistic to think that privatization will result in the creation of more pedestrian paths interfacing with existing automobile paths instead of old ladies going airborne through some technological miracle.
I think flying cars will be considered too dangerous by most people. Ground cars have the advantage that if the engine stops or the fuel tank is empty, they just stop, without accelerating towards the ground with 9.8 m/s 
In the common law, when the state abandons the road, ownership devolves to the abutting property owners. Thus, the abutting properties would be extended to the middle of the road on each side. Obviously, the property owners have an interest in maintaining their easement across what is now their neighbor’s property and vice versa. They’d either sell to an entrepeneur for the present value of net future tolls or form a co-op.
Given the legal framework already in place, private roads are probably the least problematic in terms of transition to organic society, which is ironic given that “roads” are usually the first thing you hear when you question the need for the state.
That’s a really good point and one I hadn’t thought of before. That would work for both neighborhood streets as well as city steets as the businesses (or really the owners of the businesses) conntected to the road would be able to do this very same thing. I think it would be harder to do that with the interstate system since they aren’t really connected to anything except other roads.
But who would get the sewers?
I think the same result would obtain by extension. IIRC, you own your land down to the point of intersection with your neighbors, subject to duties of lateral support.