A lengthy investigation of the deadly pile-up on the North Tarrant Express toll road in Fort Worth three years ago shows Texas transportation officials were...

Reporter Yamil Berard scoured through thousands of pages of court records, documents from the National Transportation Safety Board, and videos of that tragic day in February 2021 when 130 cars, trucks and semis piled up along a stretch of the North Tarrant Express. Early morning commuters, unaware of the black ice beneath them, crashed one after another along two lanes bound by concrete barriers on both sides. The horrific scene spanned the length of three football fields.

  • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
    6·
    23 days ago

    I actually read a book by a noted libertarian economist making the case for privatizing all roads (its easier to tear down a stupid argument if you start by taking it seriously).

    What I expected was, y’know, just a bad argument. Like, there would be a bunch of super positive assumptions about how a bunch of stuff would work out that just don’t work in reality, that sort of thing.

    What I got was quadruple decker raised glass highways with holes cut into them for rain to fall through.

    No, you did not hallucinate that sentence.

    That is the libertarian answer to how you solve the problems with privatizing all roads. Every road, even those in cities (especially cities) is actually four or five competing roads stacked on top of each other, owned by different companies, made of perfectly transparent glass so as not to deprive anyone living below them of their God given access to sunlight, and full of holes so as not to deprive anyone of their God given right to rain.

    The author comes to this conclusion after realizing “Oh shit my libertarian homesteading fantasy doesn’t work if Jeff Bezos can just build a highway over your property, but my private roads fantasy doesn’t work if Jeff Bezos can just buy up a thin strip of land all the way around LA and then charge people a thousand dollars to cross it.”