Levinson and Junge on Property Tax on Privatized Roads

Last week we posted a link to the new article by David Matthew Levinson (Minnesota) and Bhanu Yerra (Minnesota), How Land Use Shapes the Evolution of Road Networks.  Here's another road article from Levinson and Jason Junge (Minnesota): Property Tax on Privatized Roads.  The abstract:

Roads cover a significant fraction of the land area in many municipalities. The public provision of roads means this land is exempt from the local property tax. Transferring roads from public to private ownership would not only remove maintenance costs from city budgets, but increase potential property tax revenue as well. This paper calculates the value of the land occupied by roads in sample cities and determines the potential revenue increase if they were subject to property tax. Further calculation computes the extent to which the property tax rate could be reduced if the land value of roads were added to the tax base. Property tax on privatized roads could generate meaningful revenue, but a corresponding reduction in rate for existing property would be small.

Matt Festa