alt Hacker News> If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used
There's everyone else who uses the road, too.
Lots of railroads were built with private money for various purposes.
These days, even the government doesn't seem capable of building railroads. There's Caltrain, and in Seattle it's taking decades to build a few miles of light rail, at a cost that exceeds the GDP of Norway. Well, maybe not quite that much (!) but it sure seems like it.
Replies
Railroads are a natural monopoly, as are highways, power lines, last-mile internet, etc. Once you have a railway in place, it is rarely profitable to have a single competitor, let alone the three or four you would need for a genuinely competitive market.
On the East Coast, the NYC subway could be one example of enshittification running the course. It started with competing private companies.. now if they'd go into real estate like the Tokyo metro
Walmart uses it a lot more than I do. Civeng principles show that road damage rises to the fourth power of axle weight, a fully loaded tractor-trailer does roughly 10k times structural damage of a passenger car but they definitely don't pay that amount.
And yeah the government is consistently incompetent. But there's no incentive for them to be competent in the first place. Either a mostly exempt-from-competiton company does it badly or a fully exempt-from-competition state does it badly in our system.