The notion of private highways, which must have seemed fantastic to Americans just a few years ago, was commonplace to our great-great-grandparents. Built in the 1790s in the growing Republic, the first toll roads stimulated commerce, settlement, and population. Fiscal constraints and insufficient administrative manpower led communities to search outside the public sector for help. During the 19th century more than 2,000 private companies financed, built, and operated toll roads. A glimpse at our history may provide a useful perspective on today's budding toll-road movement. 

With county and state government unable to effect road improvement, California lawmakers immediately opened the field to private initiative. At least 159 private companies successfully built and operated toll roads in California. Compared to earlier toll roads in the eastern U.S., the California roads were concentrated in ownership and more profit-oriented in operation. Even so, the quest for mere road improvement was often also an important impetus for taking toll road stock. Voluntary association assumed the corporate form to achieve its several goals.

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 dissolved. Property rights in curbspace determine whether scheduled service will be preserved, and whether jitney services will co-exist. We analyze the dynamics of thick and thin transit markets, with and without curb rights. We develop a governance system of curb rights that would let bus operators appropriate their own investments in scheduled service, yet would avoid monopoly by letting jitneys and competing scheduled services operate along the same route. A property rights system dispenses with government ownership, franchise contracting, and regulation.

The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act mandated that local governments that violate federal ozone (urban smog) standards abide by a dizzying array of regulations, many of the most controversial of which--centralized state inspection and maintenance programs, carpooling requirements, zero- emission vehicle sales quotas, use of alternative fuels, and new-vehicle emission standards--are intended to control automobile emissions.

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 obstacles by phasing in congestion pricing over a period of many years.

Reducing emissions of pollutants from cars requires that new vehicles be designed and built to pollute less, and also requires some ongoing inspection and maintenance programme to ensure that a vehicle's operation conforms to those design standards. This paper focuses on these programmes, commonly called Smog Check programmes. The most extensive and well-studied Smog Check programme in the United States is in California. Though that state is not typical in all respects, examining its experience is instructive.

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 been done on canals, and studies of railroads have engendered some of the most vibrant debates in American economic history. Yet no substantial study of road transport has been done in decades. In 1964, Robert Fogel complained about the "neglected problem" of road transportation in the nineteenth-century. Fifteen years later, Fogel lamented that "the issue of antebellum wagon transportation should not be left in such a highly conjectural and unsatisfactory state." Although Winifred Rothenberg's work on Massachusetts's farmers has produced some suggestive insights on the cost of road transport, Fogel's call has gone more or less unheeded.

The experience of British bus deregulation has resulted in less on-the-road competition than anticipated, and a high degree of industry concentration. We argue that the specific form of deregulation in Britain has created a property rights problem in the cultivation of passenger congregations at the curb. The result has been schedule jockeying and route swamping. From a property rights perspective, the disappointing results can be seen as a commons problem. A nuanced approach to property right at bus stops, permitting scheduled service to appropriate its investment in cultivating passenger congregations, and allowing freewheeling jitneys to compete on the route, could bring the benefits that many had expected from deregulation.