A consensus is emerging among transportation economists that the best way to deal with freeway congestion is to charge for driving during peak hours. The main barrier to implementation is political: drastic change is politically unpopular. This paper proposes a way of overcoming the political...

I arrived here at the UC Transportation Center just nine months ago. A former lawyer and aspiring writer, I had only a layman's knowledge of transportation systems, mostly based on my personal experiences.  Growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, I thought traffic jams meant having to circle the parking...

Urban transit has traditionally been conceived and governed within a paradigm of regulation and government ownership. This study explains how the alternative paradigm of property rights, which works so well in other sectors of the economy, can apply to urban transit. The key to a property rights...

The years 1800-1830 are sometimes designated "the turnpike era," since in the 1830s canals and railroads began eclipsing the old wagon roads. Its true that long distance travel went by water and rail, but the journey often began on one of the many short toll roads feeding the system. This paper...

The importance of canals and railroads has hardly grown "deeper and deeper," but at least they had their day. As for plank roads, most people have never heard of them. The historical obscurity of plank roads reflects the general scholarly neglect of nineteenth-century roads. Excellent work has...

The paper shows how variations in systems of property rights explain diverse experiences of urban jitneys and buses. Scheduled bus service entails route specific investments and cultivation of a market. If these investments can be expropriated by interloping jitneys, scheduled service will be...

Barcelona commuters receive a monthly highway bill, without ever having stopped at a tollbooth. Cars on the Autostrada, which connects Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples, whiz past roadside electronic readers that automatically deduct credit from prepaid smartcards which are similar to the...

From 1847 to 1853 New Yorkers built more than 3,500 miles of wooden roads. Financed primarily by residents of declining rural townships, plank roads were seen as a means of linking isolated areas to the canal and railroad network. A broad range of individuals invested in the roads, suggesting...