Where the sidewalk ends

Imagine if your city sold its sidewalks to private investors.

To make the investment worthwhile, the buyers would charge fees to use the walkways. At first, drivers might be happy to be rid of paying taxes to build and maintain sidewalks. “The cost of sidewalks will now be borne directly by their users!” they would celebrate.

City government would proclaim the efficiency of the deal, reminding voters that they are no longer taxed for sidewalk maintenance. Elected officials would reiterate that the company paid the city a few million dollars to lease the sidewalks for decades.
But slowly cracks would appear in this story of utopian efficiency. Pedestrians would find themselves paying higher fees each year.

Motivated only by profit, the sidewalks’ new owners would not take long to realize they could collect payments from drivers to cross from their homes to their cars.
In short, private ownership of sidewalks could quickly make life in a city unlivable. Yet privatization increasingly defines Indiana governments’ strategies for managing public infrastructure.

In 2006, Indiana became the first state to sell a major highway. In the last four years, users of the Northern Indiana toll road have watched tolls double.

Indianapolis officials are now negotiating the final details of a 50-year lease of the city’s street parking, apparently not considering the climbing toll rates a warning.
Because private companies, unlike governments, make investments in order to generate profit for themselves, we should be highly skeptical of the efficiency of infrastructure leases.

A company tells the government: We’ll give you an upfront payment and then a yearly leasing fee so you can pay us to use the place that you own. But like any private business, we don’t work for free. So we won’t return to you all the money we collect. We’ll keep some of that money for ourselves.

The fact that these leases amount to government giving away profit to select private owners somehow gets lost in the celebration of the deals’ supposedly business-like efficiency.

Take Arizona, for example. The state put its Capitol Building up for sale.
Lawmakers announced the move as a way to fix the annual budget, seemingly forgetting that the sale will only increase expenses in the long run.

While lacking the hyperbolic symbolism of Arizona’s folly, Indianapolis’ parking lease might be worse in effect.

Roads and sidewalks make all private property possible. Streets link us together, allowing us to freely patronize each other’s businesses. Restaurants and shops would not thrive long if they could only cater to neighbors with adjoining properties.

Indiana governments have confused becoming more business-like with giving away lucrative assets. In fact, no successful business would consider
operating this way.

Transportation infrastructure was built by the public, and we benefit tremendously from owning it, so it’s a mystery why Indiana has become so eager to discard its most valuable assets.

With increasingly less public infrastructure, I’m left hoping my sidewalk isn’t sold next.

E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu