----- Original Message -----
From: "William Herrin" <bill@herrin.us>
On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 4:34 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
I will point out that in my experience, private roads do not tend to be as well maintained overall as public roads with some notable exceptions in very wealthy gated communities.
Ironically, I've had the opposite experience. The nearby Dulles Toll Road, Greenway and Beltway HOT lanes are all in much better condition than all but a few of the rest of the local roads. My buddies out at http://hoveroad.com/ don't keep the roads in as good shape, but they are in excellent repair for an organization that maintains 157 miles of roads on a $1M annual budget. Vastly better than what I've seen a municipality achieve for the same price.
Stop it, Bill. Owen didn't say "privately owned *toll road*"; "very wealthy gated communities" are even still rarely large enough to need their own turnpikes. If you keep setting up straw men, we'll be happy to knock them down for you, but you'll end up looking a little foolish. Stop trying to make the arguments fit the end-game, and have the same conversation the rest of us are, ok? (And the next assertion you shouldn't make is that I'm saying governments are perfect, or even better than private corporations *IN GENERAL*; we're talking about a very specific commons, with a very specific set of requirements that are not well served by proprietary profit-making corporations.) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274