It's Not My Silly Bridge

It's Not My Silly Bridge
by Michael R. Allen

Tuesday, October 12, 1999

If there is one area where government is recognized as inept and corrupt, it has to be the building and maintaining of roads.

This year, highway planners in Illinois and Missouri proposed that a new bridge must be built over the Mississippi at Saint Louis. Running over this bridge would be Interstate 70, the great road that stretches from Utah to Pennsylvania. However, this new $500 million bridge is not being planned to relieve heavy long-distance travel that clogs existing bridges. It is instead designed to carry more and more local commuter traffic.

More commuter traffic? Wasn't that the rationale for constructing the existing major St. Louis bridge back in 1967? If these bridges cannot keep up with the traffic growth of thirty years, then a new strategy is needed for this project and other road projects everywhere: no new roads at all.

I fully support the right of every American to live in whatever city he chooses. I don’t care if someone who hates city schools relocates to an instant-exurb. Let him do that if he pleases. The attack on so-called urban sprawl is mounting as politicians like Al Gore try to create growth boundaries around old suburbs. Critics of suburban life have a few valid points, but most of their solutions involve handing more political power to corrupt big-city governments.

Suburbanites ought to defend their lifestyle choices completely, but if they wish to carry the moral debate, they must stop using subsidies to build their new lives at everyone else's expense. After all, graft-wielding politicians drove down the vitality of urban centers from which the commuters have fled. And the cities are demanding new subsidies which they claim are needed to stop people from choosing where to live.

Still, the suburbanites cannot resist public money -- especially when it comes to highways.

In St. Louis, the new bridge has finally united city and eastern suburbs in a fight for more spending on the project. To pay for it, their first choice is to apply for federal funds which will be paid for by every American citizen. If the Department of Transportation for some odd reason does not pay out, the back-up plan will be equally unjust. The planners would slap a toll on every bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis to fund the eastern commuters' new shortcut to work.

Wait a minute, let me get this straight. Eastern suburb residents want everyone who crosses the river into the city, tourist, trucker and commuter, to pay for their shortened commute?

Hey, it's not my silly bridge! I do not plan on using it. I do not have to pay for my neighbor’s new mailbox, or his new car, but I have to pay for his ride to work through my gas tax or a toll on a different route than he uses? Of course, I do. There is a way to supply roads without violating my natural right to property, and that is taking the government out of the road business altogether.

The market would deliver better roads than the government can, because the providers of roads would be held accountable for their mistakes. Also, private roads would necessarily have to charge a toll. Anyone who thought a road was in disrepair or was too congested could find a new road to take, and the first road owner would have to improve his operation or go broke.

Since the government's control of roads is not going to disappear overnight, there is another way to make sure no one pays for anything they do not use. The new bridge should be a toll bridge, with all funds raised used to pay down its debt and operation. Tolls should also be added to every other bridge in the area, to pay for maintenance.

I can hear the objections already: “I have a right to my home. I have a right to my job.”

True, but individual rights also entail not abusing the rights of others. A right to hold a job does not entitle anyone to a direct work route that is free from traffic, though the government encourages that daffy notion. In the market, or even with a state-run toll system, people would have to change their habits to accommodate the market -- just as it is with nearly every other service offered today.

With tolls, only the drivers who use a bridge pay for its upkeep. Rather than stealing from every American taxpayer, the commuters have to pay their own way across the river.

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