Privatizing Indiana’s roads

Every year I forget something at my parent’s house in Northwest Indiana when I move back to college. This year was no different – I forgot my mattress. (That’s right, I said I forgot my mattress.) But I did get something besides avoiding future back problems for the $40 I spent traveling back. I got to meet the new neighbors. Here all the way from Spain, they’re working on the newly privatized NW Indiana Toll Road. They shared the goings-on behind the new trend to privatize roads.

Now, you probably remember talk about Bush privatizing our ports in 2006, but you probably didn’t hear Mitch Daniels say that the Indiana Toll Road might “one day land on the auction block as part of a mass liquidation of state assets” (whatever, it was local news). Well, that was in 2005, and since then, it’s become prophetic of a dangerous trend.

It’s been 50-plus years since the Federal-Aid Highway Act. Our roads are getting old. They’re beginning to require dramatic overhauls. However, most state politicians, not wanting to increase taxes to pay for such overhauls, have decided the best way to pay for the maintenance is to sell them off to someone else at reduced cost (and a cheap dollar). Indiana is losing its roads. And of course Daniels’ reason for this was that the roads could be run more efficiently from the private sector. 

I’m all for privatization in some areas, just not with roads. The main reason the private sector is famous for efficiency is that it has competitive incentives. But, how do we make roads competitive? It’s obvious the tolls are going to stay in place (the NW Indiana Toll Road was originally designed to pay off its own construction expenses, but our state representatives got used to the revenue stream the road brought and the tolls became permanent), and if companies get roads they’ll only raise prices. So are citizens supposed to drive three hours out of their way to pick a competitive road option if they don’t like the toll price? No, that defeats the purpose of the Federal-Aid Highway Act in the first place – “to connect by routes, as direct as practicable, the principal metropolitan areas, cities and industrial centers.”

Well OK, what if we let another company build a competing road beside the existing one and unnecessarily tear down more land? It could create competition. That’s not good either. That idea will just bring us back to the Southern Indiana Toll Road controversy. You can’t make our state’s roads competitive without inconveniencing everyone in the process.

Daniels’ other argument for privatization is that only those who use the road pay for it, instead of taxing all state citizens. While he might not drive on the NW toll road himself, a central Indiana farmer probably does use farming supplies from Chicago distribution centers, and he might even send his product that way to market. But call me crazy, because I thought we all benefited from good roads – wasn’t that the point of connecting us all?