Leftist Short Termism?

I'm a big fan of Chris Dillow and his blog Stumbling and Mumbling; it's usually a good source of slightly unconventional but well argued economic thought.

I'm a little unconvinced though by a recent post on road pricing. I think it's an example of where leftist thinking is not dynamic, and can be very short-termist - precisely what lefties often accuse the markets of being, funnily enough.

Dillow says that people are forced to use the roads at peak time as opposed to choosing to, and hence the shop floor assistant at Next will get a short shrift arguing to come in later as it'll cost less to use the roads later in the morning. But it is surely the case that current, standard, working hours are a consequence of free-at-the-point-of-use roads - because they are free, they do not affect marginal decisions - although of course, the possibility of traffic will influence marginal decisions where people attach a monetary value to sitting in an hour's traffic to do a 10 minute journey.

If roads were priced for how much we use them, then this additional cost would be factored into decisions regarding jobs: will you take that job if it also costs that bit more to get there for the particular hours specified? It seems likely that such a move to road pricing would lead to more flexible work patterns and maybe an abandonment of the standard 9-5.

There's another bit of lefty-ness in Dillow's article too: the belief that self-interest of the right underpins such demands for road pricing. Maybe it does, but I sense this is a fear of the unknown thing as much as anything. Who uses roads the most? Well it's probably corporate users - the big trucks hurtling up and down the motorways, and the salesmen in their company cars. Why shouldn't these users pay proportionately more than the rest of us, especially given the mess of the roads that huge trucks make? If there is a set of free riders around here it must be haulage companies, perhaps the companies that moan the most about anything to do with taxes and the roads.

Finally though, Dillow takes a distinctly anti-market stance, suggesting that price signals would not be effective with roads, but it's not clear why that would necessarily be so. Economists have a number of grounds on which some kind of market intervention might be justified (and the current road system is a huge market intervention by government) on efficiency grounds, and roughly speaking they are:

1. Is there perfect competition, or a sufficiently competitive environment for providers to operate?
2. Are there externalities or missing markets such that the privately optimal outcome differs from the socially optimal one? Public goods come under this rough category.
3. How (im)perfect is information spread amongst market participants? Perhaps most important here is how costly are mistaken choices?

It strikes me that of these categories, (1) perhaps poses the most difficulties: Given the road network that already exists, how would/could this work as a market structure? Could roads be owned by particular companies who then charge a fee for each use? The concern would be where a road constitutes the only way of getting from A to B, since this might be seen as a monopoly - although of course it isn't necessarily. If it's the M40 between Oxford and Birmingham, well I can take the train, or I could even if the price was sufficiently high take alternative A roads. It would be in the best interest of the company that owned (or operated) the M40 to offer a sufficiently attractive service that I would be prepared to take the M40 on a regular basis to make that journey.

There are clearly other issues such as externalities (pollution) - but congestion is not a pure externality since it is caused by the current flat-rate (free, well road taxed) pricing system for the roads.

Of course, the reality is that it's highly unlikely anything would ever actually happen in this regard anyway, since too many powerful vested interests would be disadvantaged by it...