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# The City Is Quietly Buying Back Its Own Streets
- URL: https://broadsheet.themesbykyle.com/city-buying-back-its-own-streets/
- Published: 2026-07-01T16:15:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-19T20:21:49.000Z
- Description: A decade after selling its roads to private operators, the metropolis is reversing course — and discovering that undoing a privatisation is far harder than signing one.
- Author: Steven Campbell
- Tags: World

Ten years ago the city sold the management of its busiest roads to a consortium of private operators, in a deal hailed at the time as a masterpiece of modern municipal finance. This month it began, quietly and expensively, to buy them back.

The reversal is a case study in the asymmetry of privatisation. Selling a public asset takes a signature and an afternoon. Reclaiming it takes years of litigation, a renegotiation of contracts written to be difficult to escape, and a bill that will fall, as these bills do, on the people who use the roads.

City officials frame the buy-back as a correction rather than an admission, though the distinction is thin. The lesson they draw is not that the original sale was corrupt but that it was optimistic — a bet that private efficiency would outweigh the loss of control, made by people who would not be in office when the bet came due.