Defining a Better Transport System, Part 2:
Freedom to Drive, or Freedom from Driving?
Key Takeaways
- Freedom is central to the pro-car argument, but it rarely gets tested against what freedom actually means.
- Individualist freedom rests on the harm principle: you're free to act until your choices start harming others.
- Ranked by harm to others, transport modes fall into a familiar hierarchy: the private car does the most harm.
- Our transport system isn't the product of free choice so much as of subsidy: social costs run up to three times what drivers actually pay.
- Even a strict individual-freedom argument implies private toll roads, not car-dominant roads funded by everyone.
- Car dependency, driven by land use and underinvestment in alternatives, forces many people into car ownership they can't afford.
- A genuinely freedom-maximising system prices driving much closer to its social costs, increasing demand for walking, cycling, and public transport.
- Removing driving subsidies could shrink public transport funding needs too, as higher ridership lets fares cover more of the cost.
- Rural and remote areas wouldn't simply lose out. Public transport services would improve, and many existing taxes on driving would fall.
- Individualist and collectivist views of freedom in transport systems converge once subsidies are removed, suggesting this is one of the few transport arguments with genuine left-right common philosophical ground.
What Next?
Do you understand how your current transport system affects people’s freedom?
Introduction
Last week I looked at what better transport systems mean for economic productivity. This week, I'm turning to a lens constantly invoked in battles over transport change: freedom.
Freedom has become one of the most effective arguments for car-dominant transport systems. People should have the freedom to drive where they want, park where they want, and choose their own mode without government interference. It's a compelling pitch, and it's also, as we'll see, largely wrong.
Before we can test that claim, we need to be clear about what freedom actually means.
What do we mean by freedom?
Freedom is a contested idea. Some people see it in individualist terms: freedom as the absence of interference. Others see it in collectivist terms: freedom as something society enables together. The "freedom to drive" argument comes from the individualist tradition, so that's the lens I'll use first (I'll return to the collectivist view later in this post).
Central to individualist freedom is the harm principle: people are free to act as they choose, so long as those actions don't harm others. Actions that affect no one but yourself are your own business. Actions that impose risk or damage on other people are fair game for regulation.
In a transport context, this means asking how much harm each mode imposes on everyone else, how dangerous it is, how much pollution it creates, how much congestion it generates. Line the modes up by that measure, and you land on something close to the familiar transport hierarchy: walking as the least harmful, the privately owned car as the most.
Of course, the harm any mode causes isn't fixed; it depends on how it's used. A speeding driver, a cyclist running a red light, a scooter dumped across a footpath: behaviour shifts the harm up or down. But the ranking of potential harm across modes still holds, and it's why we regulate the way we do: speed limits, vehicle emissions standards, drink-driving laws. Government steps in not to restrict freedom for its own sake, but because someone's choice is creating real risk for someone else.
The second piece of individualist freedom is a guard against the tyranny of the majority: the idea that the majority shouldn't be able to impose its preferences on the minority. In transport terms, that means people who prefer one mode shouldn't be allowed to crowd out people who prefer another.
With that definition in hand, the real question is this: how do our current transport systems measure up?
The Freedom of Our Current Transport Systems
Nearly every transport system in the world is motor-vehicle-dominant. The standard defence is that people chose this system freely, so it must be the one that maximises freedom. Is that true?
Start with price. People don't choose cars based on what they'd most like to drive; they choose based on what they can afford. If desire alone drove the market, we'd see a lot more Ferraris on the road. Price shapes demand, and driving is heavily subsidised almost everywhere: social costs run up to three times higher than the private costs drivers actually pay.
Remove the subsidy and make drivers cover the full cost of driving, and there would be a lot less driving (we see this even when small amounts of the subsidy are removed, such as through congestion charges). In other words, a major reason our transport systems look the way they do isn't free choice; it's the fact that society quietly covers much of the bill.
The philosopher Robert Nozick, a committed defender of individual freedom from government, argued that the state should fund only a narrow range of things, and roads weren't one of them. Take his argument seriously and ask what would have happened without public road funding: not the absence of roads, but a private system of toll roads. Driving would have cost more, there would have been less of it, and its social costs would have shrunk accordingly.
So the "free choice" defence of car-dominant transport doesn't hold up well philosophically. Strip away our addiction to taxpayer road spending and parking provision, and people's choices would look very different.
The current system fails freedom in two further ways. First, car-dependent land use leaves many people with no real alternative to driving, forcing car ownership on them at a cost that runs to around ten thousand dollars a year in the United States. For low-income households, it's a burden that pushes people toward poverty.
Second, because so much money and land goes into roads for cars, other modes are starved of the same investment and squeezed out. Where there's no bus lane, no cycle lane, no decent footpath, walking, cycling and public transport are much less desirable options.
None of this makes the freedom argument any less popular politically. It's remarkably effective at protecting the status quo and casting alternative modes as the imposition, proof that a comfortable argument doesn't need to be an intellectually coherent one.
So set the rhetoric aside. If we actually cared about freedom, rather than using the word to defend self-interest, what would a freedom-maximising transport system look like?
A Freedom-Maximising Transport System
A freedom-maximising transport system starts from one principle: people bear the full cost of their own choices, rather than asking others to subsidise them. (I'll come back to whether some subsidies are justified on equity grounds in a future post.)
Under that principle, driving becomes more expensive, and people do less of it. Congestion and the other social costs of driving fall along with it.
On its own, though, that shift would simply make people worse off, narrowing what they can afford and curtailing their freedom in every other part of life. The rest of the picture is what makes this a freedom-maximising system, not just a driving-limiting one.
As driving gets more expensive, public transport becomes genuinely competitive without needing to be propped up. More people use it, and the case for subsidising fares for mode shift, a policy that has a poor track record of shifting people out of cars anyway, largely disappears (I appreciate that there are other, in my opinion, weak arguments for low fares). Less driving also frees up road space and land for the things that were squeezed out before: dedicated cycle lanes, bus lanes, proper footpaths. People finally get a real choice of mode, rather than one option that works and several that don't.
The public finances shift too. Government funding for transport can shrink substantially. Once road use carries a direct price, taxpayers no longer need to fund the infrastructure; the private sector can, much as toll roads around the world already do. And once public transport usage rises with reasonable fares, it becomes viable for the private sector, or even the public sector, to run it profitably, with little or no subsidy. Car-share services become more attractive too, filling the gap for the trips where driving still makes sense but owning a car doesn't, enabling more people to give up their cars.
Any savings from reduced public transport spending could flow back to taxpayers as lower general taxes, leaving people with more money to spend on their own transport needs, however they choose to meet them.
Freight shifts as well. Rail freight becomes far more competitive with road freight, justifying greater private investment, taking pressure off road space, and improving both congestion and safety.
What does this mean for people in rural and remote areas? Are they simply left to drive everywhere and absorb the full social cost themselves? I don't think so. Public transport would significantly improve, and E-bikes already let people travel further by active modes than was possible a decade ago, extending the reach of cycling well beyond what's been typical in the countryside. At the same time, much of what rural drivers currently pay through fuel taxes and similar levies would fall or disappear, and per-kilometre road-user charges are expected to be considerably lower outside cities, since rural driving doesn't carry the congestion costs urban driving does.
What this all means for welfare payments is, again, a question for the equity post.
Put it all together, and a freedom-maximising transport system looks like this: much less driving and car ownership, much less congestion, much more public transport, walking and cycling, and, as a consequence, far lower social costs.
Other Considerations
So far I've argued this from an individualist view of freedom. What happens if we switch to a collectivist lens instead, one focused on society's interests as a whole, including environmental outcomes? (I'm setting equity aside again here; it gets its own post.)
The honest answer is: not much changes. Once driving subsidies are removed, I struggle to see how a collectivist freedom lens would arrive anywhere meaningfully different from the system described above, one with a lot less driving and a lot more public transport, walking and cycling. The problem was never really about individualism versus collectivism; it's about the subsidies and incentives that let one group offload its costs onto everyone else. Drivers invoke "Freedom" not as a principled stand, but as a way to dress up getting others to pay for the costs they impose on society.
That convergence could be useful. If individualist and collectivist reasoning land in roughly the same place, it means the freedom argument isn't just another left-right battleground. Of course, getting there is a different question. Ending decades of embedded transport subsidy in a way that's both effective and politically survivable is a genuinely hard problem, and one I'll return to in a future post.
One more thing worth addressing: does any of this change with the rise of autonomous vehicles? Not really. If AV users still have to bear the full social cost of their trips, the same incentives apply: less driving, less AV use, than in a subsidised system. AVs may well be safer and cleaner than today's cars, lowering their social cost somewhat. But even at their best, they'll still carry a higher social cost than walking, cycling or public transport. The freedom argument doesn't make a system desirable just because the vehicle drives itself.
Conclusion
When we strip away the rhetoric, the "freedom to drive" argument doesn't hold up. It rests on a system where the private cost of driving is only a fraction of its true cost, and where an ever-diminishing set of options, walking, cycling, public transport, has been engineered into unviability. That isn't freedom. It's a set of choices shaped, and often forced, by decades of subsidy and land-use decisions.
A genuinely freedom-maximising transport system looks very different from the one most of us live with. Less driving, not because it's banned, but because it's honestly priced. More walking, cycling and public transport, not because people are coerced onto them, but because they finally become really good alternatives. Less congestion, less pollution, and less money spent by government overall.
What's most striking is how little this conclusion depends on which flavour of freedom you start with. Individualist or collectivist, the diagnosis is the same: subsidies and incentives let one group externalise its costs onto everyone else. That convergence matters. It suggests the freedom argument, properly understood, isn't a left-right wedge issue.
None of this means the path from here to there is simple. Removing decades of embedded subsidy is politically hard, and it raises real equity questions for low-income drivers, for people in the countryside, for anyone currently dependent on a system we built around them. I'll turn to that equity lens in a future post.
For now, the challenge is simpler: the next time someone invokes freedom to defend the status quo, think about whose freedom, and at whose expense.