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.
