Rep. Boehner to sell highways

House Speaker John A. Boehner wants to sell key U.S. highways to private interests that contributed to his reelection campaign.

Interstate 5 from Mexico to Canada would be cut into four sections and "privatized." The first section would run from Mexico through Los Angeles; the second from Los Angeles to Redding, Californa; the third from Redding to Portland, Oregon, and the last from Portland to the Canadian border.

"The sale of this underutilized asset will help with the deficit," Boehner said. "Private enterprise will do a better job."

"Transportation is under attack from both state and federal governments," Boehner said. "These bureaucrats have never set foot in a car factory, and many of them don't even like to drive."

Boehner also says the new owners of the blacktop should be able to set separate speed limits for individual vehicles. The proposal would allow Transport Inc. to "sell" higher speeds to the drivers of BMWs and Mercedes, while limiting the speeds of vehicles from other manufacturers. The same would be true of larger vehicles, such as trucks.

Some independent truckers have worried that the owners of Transport Inc., which has put in a bid for the Oregon section of the interstate, also own trucking companies. They say that Transport Inc. could set higher speed limits for their own trucks, or even limit the number of competing trucks from smaller companies.

"There are other highways if they choose to use them," Boehner said of those concerns.

He also said these complaints actually come from regulators in Washington who oppose the free market. “We see this threat in how the (govt.) is creeping further into the free market by trying to regulate the highway system,” Mr. Boehner said.

The idea that competition might actually be reduced by monopoly ownership of I5, constructed largely with federal highway dollars, did not concern the Republican.

“The last thing we need, in my view, is the US Department of Transportation serving as traffic controller, and potentially running roughshod over trucking companies who have been serving their communities with transportation for decades,” he said to loud applause.

For more on Boehner's remarks, see this.