Тег: Urbanism

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.

Let’s imagine that some crazy landowner in the city put up a giant-sized poster with, say, an image of an erotic nature.

Out of common sense, it would be right and fair to punish such a stunt immediately and force the poster to be taken down. Under a state, that is exactly what would happen. But what would happen under ancap?

Anonymous question (paid in the amount of 0.0005 BTC)

First of all, I want to apologize for not noticing the donation transferred on Thursday immediately, and therefore I am only answering now. I will try not to disappoint in the future.

Under a state, we actually see huge erotic images all over the city in the most prominent places, from billboards right in the middle of sidewalks to banners covering the entire side of a high-rise building. The image usually features some minimally dressed girl enjoying a Coca-Cola or checking how comfortable it is to sit on the hood of a sports car. I don’t know about feminists, but I like such advertising, especially now, because it reminds me of summer.

If tomorrow marketing research in focus groups shows that sales can be increased by advertising of a homoerotic nature, or scenes of violence, or something along those lines, then either we will soon see and gladly welcome fresh advertising imagery, or this will be preceded by lobbying work to obtain permission from the state to display such things, if it currently prohibits it directly.

But your question, in essence, concerned something slightly different. What if someone decided to place not an advertisement, but an image of a deliberately repulsive nature, which does not call for buying anything but simply evokes disgust? In a state, even if the current laws do not provide a ban on such things, the image can be dismantled by a simple order from some law enforcement agency, or, if it is a civilized state, there is a chance for a private lawsuit to succeed.

Quite some time ago, I wrote about some possibilities for harmonizing the urban environment under ancap; now I will consider a slightly different aspect.

In the absence of a state, a scandalous image will remain as long as the owner is willing to pay for it. Some will organize protest actions, call for a boycott, some will try to buy the building in order to destroy the image, some (the vast majority!) will limit themselves to flame wars on the internet, some might even risk pelting the owner of the object with eggs — and some will release souvenirs and begin to glorify the city’s new symbol. Imagine, a magnet of the Eiffel Tower, which was considered disgustingly ugly and people demanded its demolition in the early 20th century! Now imagine a magnet of our city’s fucking cunt-thing! Not much time will pass, and it will be impossible to imagine the city without this monument. The free market is always eclectic, and nowhere offline is this manifested as vividly as in the appearance of cities.

How do libertarians view urbanism? It is clear that they do so differently, but are there any common points? I have heard much negativity from members of the LPR towards the projects of Varlamov and Katz.

anonymous question

Mainstream urbanism is a concept according to which cities should be developed using methods of centralized planning, but this planning should be carried out not by some lobbyists, but by experts based on current scientific research. Urbanists are hardly bothered by the fact that present-day scientific developments may contradict those of the past. After all, it is a quite common occurrence when every subsequent electrician who comes to fix the wiring first asks into the void which idiot did the wiring before him.

Naturally, libertarians can conceptually approve only urbanism based on economic theory—in other words, on the idea that the market should not be hindered from solving truly complex issues, such as ensuring spontaneous order in a large city, which is precisely what it is best at.
Thus, libertarian urbanism is the maximum privatization of all public spaces in the city and the maximum deregulation of interaction between the owners of urban spaces.

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