Тег: Transport

Dedicated lanes on private roads

I own a bus company and want to make buses more attractive for commuting to increase revenue. I’ve decided to use a dedicated lane.

Several private individuals own the roads in the city. I managed to reach an agreement with two of them, but not with the last one. Moreover, he owns the most congested sections.

What should I do?

Maksim Barbukhin

I strongly doubt that in a free market, dedicating a lane for public transport would be profitable for a road owner. It’s a different story if the private owner makes one of the lanes toll-based, and subscriptions for the right to use it are purchased by bus companies, emergency services, taxi aggregators, and simply those who need it urgently and regularly. Either way, in this case, you managed to agree on a preferential right of way, and the details are not very important.

But your routes run into a road section where traffic is denser and there is no dedicated lane—for example, it simply cannot be squeezed in here because it’s the old city and it’s too narrow. Or perhaps the owner simply has a different business model and is not inclined to adapt to your needs. In this situation, I would try this option: buy advertising along the problematic sections of the road, and there, present a request to give way to the bus. The motivational part can vary. You could appeal to social consciousness, for example: “a bus is like an ambulance for those waiting at the stop; please yield the lane so people don’t wait too long, and they will be grateful to you.” Or you could do it this way: “By yielding the lane to our company’s bus, you enter a prize draw. Every day, we raffle off valuable prizes for polite drivers.” And on the advertising screen, show footage of yesterday’s winner taken from the bus’s dashcam: here is a car with such-and-such a license plate moving to the left to give way; dear driver, you have won so-and-so, contact us to receive your prize.

Many other motivation methods can be devised, focusing not on the uncooperative monopoly owner of a specific section, but on the competitive market of the users of that section. After all, you don’t need the entire lane for yourself; it’s enough that your bus is let through. The more pleasant it is for people to do this, the more likely they are to let you pass.

Toll dedicated lanes are cool, but not possible everywhere

How the Moscow Metro would work under ancap, and what would happen if someone bought all the stations? After all, competition would become impossible

анонимный вопрос

I’ll start from a distance and first recommend a recent video by Grigory Bazhenov, where he opposes authoritarian urbanists and, in particular, explains the main purpose of a city — the opportunity to earn money.

Of course, historically, the city often served as a fortress as well. But the ability to protect wealth from an external plunderer largely echoes the ability to become wealthy in the first place. If people didn’t gather in one place and accumulate assets, they wouldn’t be able to afford the construction of such convenient urban infrastructure as protective structures, nor would there be a great need for it — individual caches in the forest or migrating with herds to secluded areas would have prevailed. So, the ability to accumulate wealth by gathering in a compact, large crowd is primary.

All the conveniences that the city provides for people adapt to its main function. And if this is done poorly (for example, if the city is managed centrally and hinders people from earning), the city withers, losing the competitive race to alternatives. This also applies to the organization of urban transport.

The more mobile a city resident is, the more choices of workplaces they have, the better the place they find on average, and the wealthier they become. As a result, they gain the ability to create solvent demand for various conveniences, including even greater mobility. For the most part, it doesn’t matter what the ownership structure is in different companies providing transport services, as long as they don’t have the power to forcibly dictate their rules to competitors or consumers. In other words, properly organized transport can belong to anyone, except for the institution that creates the rules.

So in the Moscow metro, each line could have its own owner, or each station, or separate owners for stations, tunnels, and depots, and separate owners for the trains. In principle, the metro as a whole could have a single owner, and even in this case, it would continue to operate in a competitive market; its competition consists of all alternative ways to get from point to point within the city. But even if the entire city with all its streets, houses, and transport belongs to a single owner, the alternative to using urban transport becomes video communication or moving elsewhere. After all, a city is first and foremost a place where one can earn more money than outside the city, and only then is there all sorts of infrastructure for spending leisure time together in large crowds. If you can earn enough money for your needs elsewhere, the city no longer holds you as strongly.

There are 2 private railway networks in the Bay Area: BART and Caltrain. To transfer from one to the other, you have to buy another ticket. In Europe, however, a different approach is popular: state ownership and a universal ticket, which turns out to be more convenient. So, what happens—did the “free market” suck it dry?

Anonymous question

To start with, of course, I would like to recommend the articles and recordings of speeches by Farid Khusainov – as it happens, I can boast my own “tame” expert on railway topics. He talks extensively and in detail, including the difference in approaches between the American and the continental model of railway organization. But I will approach this from a completely different angle.

Yes, indeed, the state can theoretically make a certain service so profitable for the consumer that any market solutions simply cannot withstand the competition. For example, why shouldn’t the state transport passengers by rail completely for free? After all, it is not absolutely necessary for the state to make a particular service profitable – it will rob profitable private businesses with taxes and invest the money into a loss-making one.
For instance, in Venezuela, gasoline costs pennies due to state subsidies, and many would like to use such a service, but few would want to move to Venezuela for that reason=)

From what I understood from a cursory analysis of the transport situation in the Bay Area, it’s not two transport companies interacting there, but more than two dozen, and so far the market has only decided in favor of a single payment interface, but not a single ticket. It is possible that some intermediary company, having analyzed the sales statistics of all companies, could introduce a single ticket to the market that works for all or most transport companies, and the money from its price would be distributed between the companies in a proportion agreed upon between them. It is possible that such a product would even be successful. But it is also quite likely that it wouldn’t take off.

To summarize, I want to say that the state’s exit from the economy will undoubtedly make people wealthier overall and technological progress faster overall – but in individual sectors that are privileged under interventionism, deterioration is possible when transitioning to a free market. This is the price of eliminating regulatory distortions.