Street Smart - by Gabriel Roth (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Effective road transportation is crucial to economic and social well-being. Yet, in cities and rural areas worldwide, road systems suffer from traffic congestion, unsafe conditions, high costs, political corruption, waste and pork, environmental degradation, and poor maintenance.

Street Smart examines private, market-based alternatives for road services, in both theory and practice. The book explores at least four such possible directions for private services, including testing and licensing vehicles and drivers; management of government-owned road facilities; franchising; and outright private ownership. The book examines contemporary examples of entrepreneurial innovation in road pricing, commercialization, and privatization in environments as diverse as California, China, Singapore, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Although political classes everywhere are reluctant to give up their lucrative sources of power and wealth, the main obstacle to the private provision of roads is public ignorance. Street Smart now traces the history of the private provision of roads under the incredibly difficult conditions prevailing before the railway age, and shows how modern road-management and pricing technologies can enable the interactions of consumers and suppliers in free markets to provide truly responsive road services.

Review Quotes

"Street Smart is a fascinating and challenging book which offers original and refreshing contributions on rational market opportunities for the transport sector."--Peter Nijkamp, Professor in Regional Economics and in Economic Geography, Free University, Amsterdam

"Street Smart provides a clear-cut and comprehensive investigation of the prospect of either replacing or supplementing our present road system by private, market-based roads."--Gordon Tullock, Professor of Law and Economics, George Mason University

"Street Smart should help to develop thinking on the future of the road network and should be welcomed by road users in all countries."--Edmund King, Executive Director, Royal Automobile Club Foundation

"Although, as a socialist, I find it difficult to accept that roads should be privatized, as a transport professional I believe that Street Smart is essential reading for those of us struggling with the problems of efficient transportation."--Dave Wetzel, Vice Chair, Transport for London

"Every public official--whatever their views--needs to read Street Smart to understand the depth of what is becoming a revolution."--Roger Toleman, Deputy Secretary, New Zealand Ministry of Transport

About the Author

Gabriel Roth is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and has pioneered scholarly work on market-based roads, parking, and transit. Following a Rees Jeffreys Fellowship at the UK Road Research Laboratory, and studies at the Department of Applied Economics (University of Cambridge), on the economics of car parking, he worked for 20 years in five continents as a transportation economist for the World Bank. He has also authored studies for the governments of New Zealand and Sri Lanka, U.S. Agency for International Development, Inter-American Development Bank, Adam Smith Institute, International Center for Economic Growth, and other organizations, and served for three years as President of The Services Group, a consulting firm specializing in market-oriented approaches to economic development.

Mary E. Peters is the former U.S. Secretary of Transportation. Previously, she previously served as Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration at the U.S. Department of Transportation and Secretary of the Arizona State Department of Transportation.