“There is justice in that idea: People who love to drive will pay for it, and those who don’t want to pay have an extra incentive to move to those urban spaces planners like so much.”
It is NOT POSSIBLE to build private roads. Even Suckerberg, with all his billions from Facebook, would STILL not be able to privately build a highway more than a few miles long, because some rancher, or group of ranchers simply will not give up the land that’s been in their family for HUNDREDS OF YEARS, no matter what he offered.
So GOVERNMENT has to be involved, and has to TAKE those parcels, and then the corruption begins and is MUCH WORSE when private entities get to operate and profit (with monopoly protection) from those roads, as people all over North America and Europe have now found out.
If you want a ranchers land, then the land needs to be paid for not taken.
Case in point. In Minnesota (no longer live there), they were offering good money to put those wind turbines up. Good Money. If you are going to buy a ranchers land to build a private road, give him a piece of the pie in perpetuity. I bet they'd get more takers.
Yah, I quite agree. Eminent domain is absolutely essential for roads, railroads, pipelines, electric transmission lines, etc.
Without ED such absolutely essential items could not be built. I also agree it’s wrong to use government power to take land from private entity A and then give it to private entity B to make money with.
The logical approach is to have people pay a fee per mile per ton weight. That equates to them paying for the wear they put on the roads, which is only indirectly related to the gas burned.