Land as Road

A Meadow of Sacred Cows named the tell: a sacred cow is an arrangement defended, when it's defended at all, in the language of necessity or tradition, while the actual reason it survives is that a concentrated beneficiary never has to justify it against a live alternative. Public roads are the fastest way to find out whether that description holds in a room full of people who've never questioned it. Raise government-owned roads as a genuine open question — not "should this pothole get fixed faster," but "should a road be owned and governed the way a grocery store is" — and watch how quickly the conversation stops being about roads and starts being about you.

That reaction is worth taking as data rather than as a verdict. This essay follows the same test A Meadow of Sacred Cows proposed: is there a nameable, concentrated beneficiary distinct from the public that's supposedly served; would switching actually cost something real, or does the switching-cost story just function as an untested excuse; and has the arrangement ever actually been defended on the merits, or only ever defended against the disruption of changing it. Walter Block spent decades building the case that public roads fail that test on all three counts — and the fourth objection, the one that used to be the strongest, has quietly stopped being true in the last several years.

Block's case, stated plainly

Walter Block's The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors makes the argument in its most complete form: full privatization, meaning every street, path, and freeway owned outright by private parties who set their own prices and rules, would outperform the public system on the exact grounds public roads are usually defended — safety and efficiency, not just abstract property rights. Block dedicated the book to the tens of thousands of Americans killed annually in traffic, on the wager that a genuinely private road system, with an owner who bears direct liability for what happens on their pavement, would push that number down rather than up. Government streets, in his account, are an administrative and safety project run by an entity that faces essentially no market discipline and no liability exposure proportional to the harm it allows — a combination almost no other consequential public function is permitted to operate under.

Block doesn't just assert the case; he works through the four standard objections and rejects each one specifically. That eminent domain makes government uniquely capable of assembling road corridors — he answers that private assembly of contiguous land has been done before roads existed as a state function, and that eminent domain's "efficiency" mostly describes how cheap it is for the taker, not how well it prices what's actually taken from the landowner. That roads are a natural monopoly requiring state control — he answers that competing private roads, private easements, and parallel routes are not merely theoretical; they were the normal condition before states nationalized the function. That congestion is an externality only government can solve by fiat — he answers that a private owner facing paying customers has every incentive to price congestion directly, which government agencies notoriously refuse to do because the political cost of a visible toll is higher than the invisible cost of gridlock. That privatization would be unfair to property owners abutting a road they didn't choose — he answers that the current system already imposes exactly that kind of unchosen exposure, just administered by a public body instead of a private one, which makes it a difference in who administers the unfairness, not whether it exists.

Block wasn't building from nothing, and he wasn't alone

Block's contribution was the systematic, full-length case. He wasn't the first to notice the underlying pattern, and the two arguments worth adding are useful precisely because they don't depend on Block's own framing to hold up.

Ronald Coase got there first, on a different piece of infrastructure that economics textbooks had been using for generations as the clean, unanswerable example of a public good only government could provide: the lighthouse. In "The Lighthouse in Economics" (1974), Coase went back to the actual historical record of British lighthouses and found that most of them were built, owned, and financed privately for centuries — funded not by general taxation but by tolls collected at the ports ships using them would eventually dock at, with clear title, clear pricing, and no state provision required at all. The textbook example wasn't a thought experiment gone wrong; it was a fact about the world that generations of economists had simply gotten backwards, because nobody had checked the historical record before citing it as proof that the market couldn't do this. Roads occupy exactly the rhetorical position lighthouses used to: cited constantly as the self-evident case for state provision, rarely checked against what private actors have actually done when allowed to.

Fred Foldvary checked, for roads specifically, and found that the market hadn't waited for anyone's permission. His Public Goods and Private Communities argues that private provision of collective goods, roads included, isn't a hypothetical requiring new legislation — it's already the norm inside a large share of the built environment, just not labeled as the ideological case Block was making. Walt Disney World's entire road network is privately built, owned, and maintained. Virginia's Reston Association manages roads and other collective infrastructure for tens of thousands of residents through an association rather than a municipality. Large sections of St. Louis have run on private streets, financed and maintained by neighborhood associations, for more than a century. None of these needed a GNSS-metered per-mile toll to work, because Foldvary's version of the argument runs on exactly the financing loop Transitioning to LVT already argues for on separate grounds: the association or developer captures the land value the road creates, through dues or assessments tied to the property the road serves, and that captured value pays for the pavement — a private road system that was never waiting on better metering technology, because it was never trying to charge by the mile in the first place.

Put next to each other, Coase and Foldvary do something Block's argument alone doesn't: they take "private roads" out of the register of a proposal and put it back in the register of a description. The theoretical case doesn't have to carry the entire weight of imagining something unprecedented. Some of what this essay is arguing for is already running, quietly, under names — homeowners' association, private community, resort — that don't advertise themselves as a rebuttal to anyone.

The toll booth was never the argument. It was the excuse.

None of those four rebuttals is what actually gets a person laughed out of the room. The objection that lands, every time, is more mundane: how do you charge for something as granular and continuous as road use without a physical toll plaza on every block, a friction private roads couldn't plausibly survive? A toll booth works for a bridge or a turnpike with a small number of choke points. It doesn't work for a street grid, and for most of the twentieth century that was a real, physical constraint, not a rhetorical one — pricing every block of every road by the mile would have required a barrier at every intersection, which is obviously absurd, which is why it was easy to conclude the whole premise was absurd along with it.

That constraint no longer exists, and it's worth being precise about exactly when it stopped existing, because the argument's opponents have kept using a version of the objection built for a technology that's already gone. Singapore's Electronic Road Pricing 2.0 system replaces its roughly eighty physical toll gantries entirely with GNSS-based satellite positioning: an on-board unit tracks which pricing zone a vehicle is in and charges by distance traveled through it, with no gantry, no booth, and no fixed choke point required anywhere in the system. As of February 2026, roughly 93% of Singapore's registered vehicles already carry the new unit, ahead of a January 2027 mandate making it universal. Oregon's OReGO program got there first in concept, if not in scale — the first per-mile road charge in the country, running as a voluntary pilot since 2015, charging participants a flat rate per mile driven regardless of which specific road they're on. It's stayed small, around 800 enrolled drivers a decade in, precisely because it was designed as a voluntary add-on to a public system rather than the pricing mechanism of a road that actually needed the revenue to survive — which is itself a data point about what happens when metering exists but nothing depends on it working.

Both systems are still government-run. Neither is remotely the private-ownership arrangement Block described. What they demonstrate, regardless of who operates them, is that the specific technical objection — no way to meter a road network without an infrastructure of physical barriers a private network couldn't afford to build — is now simply false. A private road company in 2026 has exactly the tool Block's critics said would never exist: continuous, granular, per-meter pricing with no toll plaza anywhere. The sacred cow's fourth defense, the one that used to sound like physics rather than ideology, has quietly become a claim about 2009 pretending to still be a claim about today.

The objections that survive Block's rebuttals

Not every objection to privatized roads dissolves the way the toll-booth objection did, and pretending otherwise would repeat the exact move this essay has spent itself criticizing — restating the premise instead of engaging the strongest version of the disagreement. Four objections are worth taking seriously on their own terms, because none of them reduces to a solved metering problem.

Choke-point monopoly is a real topology, not just a rhetorical fear. Block's competition-not-monopoly answer works cleanly for a street grid, where a driver genuinely has other routes. It works far less cleanly for a single bridge across a river, a mountain pass with one practical crossing, or the only road in or out of a small town — cases where "competition" would require building a second bridge or blasting a second pass, exactly the kind of switching cost A Meadow of Sacred Cows treated as legitimate rather than excuse-shaped. A private owner controlling a genuine chokepoint has no market discipline forcing efficient pricing; they have a captive population and every incentive to extract monopoly rent instead. This is the one case where the natural-monopoly objection Block rejects for ordinary streets keeps real force, and a serious version of this argument has to say so rather than treat every route as fungible.

America already ran this experiment, and most of it lost money. The nineteenth-century turnpike era wasn't a clean proof of concept — it was mostly a commercial failure. Hundreds of private toll roads were chartered across the eastern United States between roughly 1790 and 1850; most returned little or no dividend to their investors, undermined by "shunpikers" who routed around toll gates on parallel free roads, by maintenance costs that consistently outran toll revenue, and by chronic underinvestment once a road's novelty wore off. States absorbed most of the surviving network by the early twentieth century not out of an ideological preference for public ownership, but because the pure-toll private model had already been tried at scale and had largely failed to sustain itself on tolls alone. That failure is worth holding next to the streetcar-suburb example this essay reaches for below, because the contrast is the actual lesson: the private ventures of that era that succeeded weren't the ones charging a toll for passage, they were the ones capturing the land value the route created. A serious version of Block's argument today has to build in that same loop rather than repeat the pure-toll model that already failed once.

Interoperability has a real cost that granular pricing doesn't erase. A single trip across a fragmented network of independently owned roads means a traveler potentially owes money to dozens of separate companies, each with its own account, pricing structure, and payment rail — a transaction-cost problem GNSS metering solves for measuring usage but not for reconciling who gets paid what, especially before a common clearinghouse exists across owners. A Meadow of Sacred Cows drew the line between an excuse-shaped switching cost and a genuine coordination equilibrium using exactly this kind of case — which side of the road to drive on, which measurement standard to use — and a payment-interoperability standard across thousands of independent road owners sits closer to that legitimate category than the toll-booth objection ever did.

Universal access during emergencies isn't obviously a market's job. A public road network carries an implicit guarantee that isn't priced anywhere: an ambulance, a fire engine, or an evacuating family gets to use it regardless of whether the trip is profitable for whoever owns the pavement that day. A private owner facing a mandatory evacuation has a real incentive to raise prices exactly when demand is least elastic — the same dynamic that makes price-gouging law a live policy question after every disaster — and "the market would sort it out eventually" is a weaker answer here than anywhere else in this essay, because the harm from getting it wrong during a wildfire evacuation or a flood isn't measured in economic inefficiency. It's measured directly in lives.

None of these four objections revives the toll-booth argument, and none of them defends the current system as it actually operates — a government monopoly with none of Block's proposed liability exposure and none of a private owner's pricing discipline either. What they do is narrow the claim this essay is actually entitled to make: full privatization is the stronger answer for the overwhelming majority of the road network, where real alternative routes exist and profit depends on keeping customers rather than trapping them. It is not obviously the right answer at genuine chokepoints, during declared emergencies, or before some interoperable payment standard exists across owners — which is less a refutation of Block's argument than a map of exactly where a serious privatization proposal still has real work left to do.

The acreage underneath the argument

It helps to be concrete about how much land this argument is actually about, because "a road is a strip of land like any other" can otherwise read as a rhetorical flourish rather than a literal description. Roads alone — not parking, not shoulders, just paved roadway — cover an estimated 40,000 square kilometers of the United States, something like 10 million acres, roughly the combined land area of Massachusetts and New Jersey given over entirely to asphalt. Count parking with it and the figure climbs past 60,000 square miles, on the order of 39 million acres. The country has more than four million miles of public road, enough that 83% of the contiguous United States sits within a kilometer of one. None of that is exotic or specialized land — it's ordinary, often highly valuable urban and suburban land, sitting under a government monopoly that has never had to price it, insure it, or account for what it's worth the way every other parcel in the country does.

Land isn't property like other property, and a road is the purest case of why

It's worth being precise about what kind of claim this essay is actually making when it calls a road "a strip of land like any other," because the Georgist premise underneath Transitioning to LVT and Single Tax for the Living World treats land as categorically different from every other kind of property this site otherwise defends without reservation. A car, a house's frame, a shipment of goods — these get their value overwhelmingly from labor and capital someone actually supplied, which is exactly why this site defends ordinary private property in them without hedging. Land is the one input whose value comes almost entirely from somewhere else: from the community, infrastructure, and population built up around it, none of which the titleholder personally created. That's the whole basis for treating land rent differently from wages or profit — not a special exception carved out of property rights, but a recognition that a site's value was never the owner's doing to begin with, which means the community that actually created it retains a legitimate claim on it that it doesn't retain on a car or a coat.

A road is the least ambiguous instance of that premise anywhere in the built environment, because a road's value is entirely relational. A mile of pavement laid across land nobody lives near or travels through is worth close to nothing; the identical mile connecting two dense, productive places is worth a great deal — and the difference between those two numbers was never created by whoever poured the asphalt. It was created by everyone on either end of it, choosing, for reasons that have nothing to do with the road itself, to live and work and trade where they do. Ownership of the pavement can be fully private, fully priced, fully accountable the way this essay has argued throughout. Ownership of the location that pavement occupies carries a stronger version of the same social claim every parcel of land carries, precisely because a road's entire economic identity is the connection between other people's communities rather than anything intrinsic to the strip itself. That's a sharper reason than switching costs or emergency access for why a road's land, specifically, should never simply revert to being treated like ordinary private property once title changes hands — the LVT owed on it isn't a tax bolted onto privatization as an afterthought. It's the mechanism that keeps the road honest about what kind of thing it actually is.

What a road looks like once nobody has to defend the toll booth

With that constraint gone, it's worth imagining what a fully private road actually becomes, rather than the least-imaginative version of it — a public street with a paywall bolted on. That version would indeed be a strictly worse commute. It isn't the thing Block, or the argument that follows from him, is actually describing.

A road priced continuously by an owner who bears liability for what happens on it stops being a fixed monopoly asset and starts being a service that has to keep earning its customers, block by block, the way any other business does. Congestion pricing that currently exists nowhere outside a handful of showcase cities — real-time, dynamic, responsive to actual conditions rather than a flat toll set by legislative committee once a decade — becomes the default rather than the exception, because an owner watching revenue in real time has every reason to smooth demand rather than let it pile up at a fixed price. Liability that currently gets diffused across a government entity that's nearly impossible to sue effectively becomes concentrated and insurable, the same way any other premises liability is: a road owner who under-maintains a surface or under-lights an intersection faces the same kind of exposure a mall owner faces for a wet floor, which is a sharper and more immediate incentive than a public works department's budget cycle ever supplies. Rules of the road — speed, right-of-way, what kind of vehicle is even welcome — stop being a single uniform national standard imposed everywhere regardless of local conditions, and start being something an owner can actually differentiate: a quiet, low-speed residential road bundled with the neighborhood it serves, a high-speed express corridor priced and engineered specifically for it, a shared micromobility lane an owner curates the way any other well-run private space gets curated, without needing to win a citywide political fight to do it in one specific place.

That last piece is the one this site's own commitments actually add to Block's picture rather than just borrowing it. Transitioning to LVT and Single Tax for the Living World both argue that whoever captures a location's value should be the one paying for what creates that value — and a road is, underneath the asphalt, still land, occupying a strip that appreciates or depreciates the parcels next to it exactly the way any other land does. The nineteenth century's streetcar suburbs — not its turnpikes, which the previous section already conceded mostly failed — ran on exactly this logic without needing a theory to name it: a developer who owned the land at the end of a rail line had every reason to build and subsidize the line at a loss, because the value the line created showed up as higher prices on the land it served, captured directly by the same party that built it. A genuinely private road network today could run the identical loop with vastly better tools than a nineteenth-century trolley company had — per-meter usage pricing feeding real-time revenue, land-value capture on the parcels a route actually serves feeding the capital to build and maintain it, and a liability regime that finally puts the cost of a badly engineered intersection on the party who engineered it. None of that requires abolishing markets or property, the way The Municipality Against the State noted Bookchin's own communalism would. It requires exactly the opposite: treating a road as the priced, owned, accountable asset every other valuable strip of land already is, instead of the one conspicuous exception nobody's been allowed to ask about out loud.

Privatizing the road doesn't automatically privatize the land under it

There's a way to tell this story that lets a private road company simply inherit the same free ride the government currently enjoys, and it's worth naming so the argument doesn't quietly reproduce the thing it's criticizing. Nothing about handing a road's title to a private owner, by itself, prices the land that road sits on. A road company that owns ten million acres' worth of the country's most strategically located strips — every one of them chosen, originally, for exactly the connectivity that makes surrounding land valuable — could simply collect tolls on the traffic crossing that land while paying nothing for the land itself, which is the identical move A Meadow of Sacred Cows described the Navy making with the sea lanes: a real asset, occupied and monetized, with the underlying rent never entering anyone's ledger.

A genuine land value tax closes exactly that gap, and it closes it whether the owner is a state DOT or a private turnpike company, because LVT taxes the site regardless of who holds title to it. Under a working LVT, a private road owner would owe land rent on the strip their pavement occupies — assessed the same way an adjacent parcel's is, by what the location is worth stripped of whatever's built on it — precisely because a road's location, like any other location, derives its value from surrounding development, population density, and connectivity the owner didn't personally create. That rent is also where the incentive redoubles rather than cancels out: a private owner who's already capturing land-value uplift on the parcels a route serves, the way this essay's earlier section described, is simultaneously paying land rent on the route itself, which means the profit only grows by making the corridor genuinely worth more to the people living along it — better transit, safer intersections, faster throughput — rather than by extracting monopoly toll revenue from a captive commuter with no alternative route. Privatization without LVT risks trading a public monopoly for a private one that's just as unpriced. Privatization with LVT underneath it is the version where the land itself never stops being priced, only the pavement on top of it changes hands.

Whoever controls the road controls the precondition

Everything this essay has argued so far treats road control as an economics question — pricing, liability, land rent. It's also, underneath that, a question about what social liberty actually requires in order to be exercised at all, and it's worth naming directly rather than leaving implicit. Personal Sovereignty argues that judgment belongs with whoever is closest to a decision's consequences. That premise presupposes something this essay hasn't yet said out loud: a person has to be able to physically get to where the consequence is in order to exercise judgment about it at all. A right of exit, a right of assembly, a right to simply live somewhere other than where you started, are not abstractions sitting apart from infrastructure — they run entirely through whatever network of roads a person is or isn't permitted to use. Whoever holds the choke points on that network isn't one stakeholder among the many this essay has already discussed. They hold the precondition every other liberty on this site depends on being able to act on.

That's the strongest version of the case for taking road control seriously as a liberty question rather than only a pricing one. It cuts in an uncomfortable direction for this essay's own argument, and the honest version has to say so. The entire technical case this piece has built — GNSS metering closing the toll-booth objection, per-mile pricing making privatization finally practical — depends on a system that knows, continuously and precisely, where every vehicle on it is. That is not a minor implementation detail sitting beside the pricing story. It is, potentially, the single most complete movement-surveillance infrastructure ever built, and whether it's operated by a government agency or a private road company changes who's watching, not whether anyone reasonably worried about being tracked has a legitimate concern. A state running that system can subpoena, aggregate, and cross-reference it against every other database it holds. A private company running it can sell it, breach it, or hand it over under a court order with far less of the due-process friction a government search would nominally require. Neither answer is obviously the safe one, and an essay willing to call public roads a sacred cow owes the same scrutiny to the metering infrastructure it's proposing as the replacement.

What follows from taking both halves seriously — mobility as the precondition for every liberty this site defends, and continuous location data as the precondition's most dangerous byproduct — isn't a reason to abandon the case for private, priced roads. It's a reason the case is incomplete without a real answer to the surveillance question, the same way it would have been incomplete without an answer to chokepoint monopoly or emergency access. Whatever governs a metered road network, public or private, has to be built from the start with the data it generates treated as at least as consequential as the pavement itself — aggregated rather than individually retained wherever billing doesn't require otherwise, contestable by the people generating it, and answerable to something more than whoever happens to hold title to the road that day. A road system that finally prices land honestly but tracks its users completely hasn't freed anything. It's just moved the cage from the tollbooth to the transponder.

The room, revisited

Circle back to the room where bringing this up gets a person quietly shown the door. What actually happens in that room isn't a rebuttal. Nobody produces Block's four objections and answers them; nobody explains why granular per-use pricing is technically impossible, because it no longer is. What happens is the reaction A Meadow of Sacred Cows described as the actual tell: a restatement of the premise, louder, and the faint suggestion that asking the question was itself the strange thing to do. A road financed by fuel taxes nobody itemizes, maintained by an agency nobody can meaningfully sue, priced identically whether it's empty at 3 a.m. or gridlocked at 5 p.m., has survived this long not because the case for it is strong, but because the case against it used to require an infrastructure of toll booths nobody could seriously propose. That excuse is gone now. What's left standing in the room is just the reaction itself — which was never actually an argument, only the sound a sacred cow makes right before someone finally asks what it's been eating.