Seeing the pricing mechanism of a free market as a more efficient means of meeting demand than government planning (see Economic calculation problem), Peter Samuel, in his book Highway Aggravation: The Case for Privatizing the Highways, compares American traffic jams and Soviet grocery store lines:[2] Insufficient competition between private roads could however lead to oligopoly or even monopoly pricing, which leads to higher tolls and lower construction capacities.
[citation needed] Bruce L. Benson argues that when roads are privately owned, local residents will be better able to prevent crime by exercising their right to ask miscreants to leave.
[5] He observes that avenues in the private places of St. Louis have been shown to have lower crime rates than adjacent public streets.
For instance, they wouldn't want to drive away customers by arresting or badgering hippies, girls in see-through blouses or topless bathing suits or any other non-aggressive deviation from the value standards of the majority.
In the absence of regulation, a private highway could charge an exorbitant monopoly price, resulting in huge profit margins and few benefits for drivers.
An initial franchise fee (in the case of franchised publicly owned roads) and/or savings of public capital costs, can offset the resulting monopoly profits in terms of societal costs, but there are distributional issues in that the income is spread over an entire region while the burden falls on a small subset of that region's population who actually need to use the road.