tolls

From the beginning, there were plenty of reasons to suspect that Texas 130 -- a private toll road between San Antonio and Austin -- was a bad idea.

By any reasonable measure, the Suncoast Parkway in the Tampa Bay Area has been a complete failure.

Last week's Streetblog Chicago post about Mayor Rahm Emanuel's O'Hare express train proposal struck a chord with readers, with dozens of retweets and almost 100 comments. Lots of people agreed that the existing CTA Blue Line run between the Loop and "the world's busiest airport" is already a relatively fast, high-quality service. Many readers also concurred that an airport express would be costly to build and expensive to ride, which makes the project a bad use of taxpayer money that could be better spent improving neighborhood transit.

This is the final piece in a three-part series about privately-financed roads. In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the Indiana Toll Road as an example of the growth in privately financed highways, and how financial firms can turn these assets into profits, even if the road itself is a big money loser. In this piece, we examine the shaky assumptions that toll road investments are based on, and how that is putting the public at risk.

This is the second post in a three-part series about the Indiana Toll Road and privately financed highways. Read part one.

This is the first post in a three-part series on the Indiana Toll Road and the use of private finance to build and maintain highways. 

A recent report by U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group, “Highway Boondoggles: Wasted Money and America’s Transportation Future,” examines 11 of the most wasteful, least justifiable road projects underway in America right now. This is the final installment in our series profiling the various bad decisions that funnel so much money to infrastructure that does no good.

Remember the "innovative" public-private partnership Governor Quinn lauded as a way to build the "21st century" Illiana Expressway, without shifting the entire cost onto the general public? Or remember CMAP's statement opposing the project, based on its contradictory growth projections, overestimated benefit to the region, and severe financial risk, and the multiple op-eds and articles that followed, all expressing concern about the expressway's ability to garner enough toll revenue to pay for itself?

To peer inside the minds of highway builders, take a look at what's happening in Dallas.