TxDOT pushes forward on buyback of SH 288
Action would reduce average daily toll rates by 50%

Aug. 23, 2024

AUSTIN - To provide Texans with toll relief and more free lanes on which to drive, the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is preparing to terminate the SH 288 Comprehensive Development Agreement (CDA).

This action will place the SH 288 managed lanes in Harris County under full state control allowing future toll rates to be significantly less than what is allowed under the current agreement and enabling TxDOT to move ahead with adding more free lanes along SH 288.

“Building roads, reducing tolls, and saving taxpayer money are top priorities,” said Governor Greg Abbott. “All three are achieved with the Texas Department of Transportation terminating the SH 288 Comprehensive Development Agreement. It will allow the State of Texas to receive over $2 billion in added valuation. TxDOT will use the added value to slash future toll charges and to build free lanes on that segment of State Highway 288. I thank TxDOT for making it easier and cheaper for Texans to travel that route.”

TxDOT Toll Road $1.7 Billion Purchase Plan Draws More Complaints from Elected Officials, Candidates

Officials and candidates see the move as a form of double taxation.

• Kim Roberts
• Aug 22, 2024
• l The Texan

Texas Sues General Motors Over Collection and Sale of Private Driving Data

General Motors was allegedly compensated for the deals with lump-sum payments and royalties, some worth millions of dollars.

The State Highway 288 toll lanes were part of a public-private partnership agreement that was originally set to last 50 years.

Brandon Waltens | July 26, 2024 l Texas Scorecard

Updated with comment from TxDOT on 7/29

The Texas Department of Transportation is contemplating the purchase of a Houston-area toll road from a private developer, with potential plans to maintain the tolls for Texans.

This unique arrangement involves terminating an existing agreement this October, spending nearly $1.7 billion to acquire the already-built toll lanes on Highway 288, and taking over its management and operations.

Lawmakers turned to toll roads to boost the Texas economy and address population growth without raising taxes, but the consequences have adversely affected some drivers.

The Dallas Morning News - By Yamil Berard
May 13, 2024

Link to full article...
Dallas Morning News Interactives (For Subscribers)

Every day, thousands of drivers jump on toll roads to ease their commutes to work and school.

Toll roads overlook international bridges and crossings on the Texas-Mexico border, they connect drivers to airports all over the state and they circumnavigate urban cores by way of loops and tunnels.

Texas has so many toll roads that it has earned the distinction of building more miles than nearly all other states combined. Picture this: If you stretched the state’s 852 miles of toll roads across the eastern U.S., they would pass through 13 states — from Maine to South Carolina, a yearlong Dallas Morning News investigation has found.

ABOUT THIS SERIES

Toll Trap is a three-day series exploring how the state's tollway system impacts drivers across the state. Our investigation found that Texas in the last 20 years has built more toll roads than almost all other states combined. The state also aggressively penalizes drivers with unpaid toll bills - even sending their cases to local courts every day. The state, unlike many others, also offers few discounts to drivers who feel entrapped by the toll roads that surround them. Investigative reporter Yamil Berard and data journalist Shuyao Xiao spent months examining Texas' tollway system. The journalists read thousands of pages of legislative reports, transportation studies, as well as financial statements and audits for toll roads operated by Texas' three largest toll agencies since 1998. They spoke with dozens of urban planning specialists, tollway advocacy groups, public policy researchers and mobility engineers and examined roadway and toll data from state and population density information. They filed and read reports from open records requests and attempted to speak to all 22 members of the House and Senate transportation committees along with Gov. Greg Abbott and other high-ranking current and previous elected state leaders.

TxDOT ends agreement with private company overseeing Highway 288 toll lanes

The Kill Switch

John Stossel  |  Apr 17, 2024 l TownHall.com

A USA Today "fact check" told readers, don't worry, "There's no kill switch in Biden's bill."

"They didn't read it, because it's there!" says automotive engineer and former vintage race car driver Lauren Fix in my new video. The clause is buried under Section 24220 of the law.

Chairman Graves & Chairman Crawford Statement on Court Striking Down FHWA’s Illegal GHG Emissions Performance Measure Rule

Washington, D.C., March 28, 2024 | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (202) 225-9446

Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-MO) and Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-AR) issued a joint statement following a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas that the Biden Administration exceeded its statutory authority by imposing a greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions performance measure upon the states:

“This was a clear case of blatant overreach by the Biden Administration from the beginning, and we commend the Court for its ruling that a ‘federal administrative agency cannot act without congressional authorization.’  Congress rejected the inclusion of a GHG performance measure requirement when the infrastructure law was developed, making the Administration’s rulemaking an unlawful attempt to circumvent Congress and force this one-size-fits-all burden upon every state and community across the country.  We appreciate the ruling and remain committed to ensuring the Administration does not exceed its authority.”

The 15-Minute Trap

Scientists Expose Major Problems With Climate Change Data

‘Climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,’ said astrophysicist Willie Soon.

By Alex Newman Epoch Times, February 28, 2024

Temperature records used by climate scientists and governments to build models that then forecast dangerous manmade global warming repercussions have serious problems and even corruption in the data, multiple scientists who have published recent studies on the issue told The Epoch Times.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

Link to article here.

Electric Car Drivers: Why You Might Not Be Pumped Over Privacy-Jolting Mileage Taxes
By Eric Felten Epoch Times and RealClearInvestigations 8/3/2022

The environmental impact of electric cars may still be unknown, but leaders are growing concerned about the threat they pose to the financing of the nation’s highway system. Because freeways and bridges are funded, in large part, through federal and state taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, the battery-powered future will test whether roads can just be paved with good intentions.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are trying to devise new ways to raise that fuel tax revenue, which in fiscal year 2020 delivered $35 billion to the federal government and an additional $51 billion to state and local governments. But experts say that proposed fixes to the anticipated highway funding shortfall—involving charging drivers for the miles they travel by tracking their movement—pose a significant threat to personal privacy and liberty.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed with bipartisan support last year, authorized the Department of Transportation to launch new pilot programs to test ways to collect necessary fees. These include a range of high-tech means such as accessing location data from third-party on-vehicle diagnostic devices, smart phone applications, telemetric data collected by automakers, motor vehicle data obtained by car insurance companies, data obtained from fueling stations, and “any other method that the Secretary [of Transportation] considers appropriate.”

“Location data”—that is, information about where people are and where they’ve been—“is highly sensitive,” said Lee Tien, legislative director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties in cyberspace. It can reveal “what they do, who they’re with, where they worship, what medical procedures they’re having.”

While the infrastructure act authorizes a pilot program to test collecting the personal information needed to charge drivers for their use of roads and highways, it doesn’t answer the far thornier questions about how to protect that data. Will only the feds track drivers? Will each state and locality that currently depends on fuel taxes also monitor drivers? If so, will the data be pooled? Will destinations be tracked along with mileage?

Various mileage fee schemes raise significant privacy issues for drivers. (GAO Analysis of Mileage Fee Initiatives)

These questions are arising as the Biden administration demands more energy-related data across the board as it seeks to achieve its ambitious climate change goals. The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, wants almost all U.S. companies to tally and disclose the total amount of carbon emitted in producing their products. The Federal Highway Administration and the Department of Transportation proposed new regulations in July requiring states to measure carbon dioxide emissions “associated with transportation” and report those figures to the federal government. States will be required to establish emissions targets aligned with “national policy” established by Biden’s climate-related executive orders.

Advocates of new highway user fees acknowledge the threat to privacy and promise to find ways to protect sensitive information. Asked about the risks posed by tracking vehicles, Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, ranking Republican member of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, pointed to a previous statement: “For years, I have been talking about the need to eliminate the gas and diesel taxes. It’s time to move this solution toward reality, but in doing so, we must ensure that privacy concerns are addressed.”

(U.S. Energy Information Administration)

The Department of Transportation isn’t taking on these issues from scratch. For more than a decade, DOT has been awarding grants to states willing to work out the kinks in a pay-as-you-go system. Pilot programs have been funded in states such as Minnesota, Iowa, and Nevada. The Nevada Vehicle Miles Traveled Fee Study found “The greatest barrier to public acceptance is recognized as insuring driver privacy to the greatest extent allowed by available technology.”

Asked by RealClearInvestigations about such concerns, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation said, “Privacy is of paramount importance and a requirement that has to be addressed in the pilot programs.”

Drivers have proved to be accepting of technologies that track travel when they offer obvious benefits, such as skipping toll booths or fighting crime. E-ZPass shares data with “law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations in accordance with subpoenas, court orders or amber alerts.”

At Capitol Hill hearings last year, witnesses assured lawmakers that threats to privacy could be overcome. Peter J. Basso, chair of the Mileage-Based User Fee Alliance said, “The pilots are showing the technical viability of a mileage-based system,” and are showing how to address questions of “protection of personal privacy” and “data security.”

But privacy experts such as Theodore Claypoole, an Atlanta lawyer who edits the “HeyDataData” blog, cautions that concerns might increase if such tracking becomes universal.

He said a lot of people do understand they are less anonymous on the road than they used to be. Cars these days come default-set to gather and horde data on their drivers. What app doesn’t reveal its users’ geo-locations? Insurance companies place bugs in some cars to tell what kind of drivers we are. Every day we are stalked by the Billion-Byte Beast, and yet we remain relatively blasé about it. But gathering information on our driving for tax purposes is something different, says Claypoole. It’s the federal government, not businesses, hoovering up our sensitive information. Do we find this more frightening, or less so?

Similarly, once it used to be difficult to collect comprehensive information about someone’s movements. It might take a team of field agents—the FBI has traditionally used five cars to tail a single suspect in an automobile. Surveillance used to have what privacy scholars call “high transaction costs.” Those costs served as a protection of one’s privacy.

The Supreme Court has wrestled with the question of protecting privacy in an age of tracking devices, but hasn’t resolved what happens to one’s personal information when it is being lawfully collected. In a 2012 decision, United States v. Jones, the court considered whether police could place a GPS device on a suspect’s car without a warrant. The court ruled, 9-0, that such tracking was an unreasonable search that violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.

But that ruling did not settle the question of what the government could or couldn’t do with the same sort of information when it is, in essence, freely handed over. In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the biggest threats to privacy may come from technologies that invite surveillance: “With increasing regularity, the Government will be capable of duplicating the monitoring undertaken in this case by enlisting factory- or owner-installed vehicle tracking devices or GPS-enabled smartphones.”

It turns out that people are not as quick to give up freedoms as one might think. The Government Accountability Office published a report in January on the state-level user-fee pilot programs. The GAO wrote, “Many state DOT officials told us that drivers felt concerned that a government-administered mileage fee system may track their location and collect personal data.” They reported that “public acceptance of mileage fee systems remains limited by concerns about protecting privacy.”

Recently, some abortion-rights activists worry that states with strict anti-abortion laws might prohibit travel to other states for the purpose of obtaining an abortion. (Missouri has already considered such a law.) Could vehicle tracking be used to identify individuals who cross a state border and drive to the address of an abortion provider?

Privacy advocates suggest that activists may not want there to be digital tire tracks showing them driving to the sites of controversial political rallies such as on Jan. 6, 2021 in Washington.

Convincing the public that the government will protect their privacy and won’t track their travel, the GAO found, made for “major challenges facing mileage fee systems.” Minnesota DOT officials were blunt about the lack of trust people have in the tech-enabled state: The “public does not want governments to have their travel or personal information.”

Privacy advocates tell RCI that sooner or later highway funding will move to user fees—and probably sooner, given the effect electric vehicles will have on fuel tax revenues. And yet, for all the assurances made in pilot programs that privacy will be protected, the public remains unconvinced. Will the government have to change those attitudes, or will rules be made by bureaucrats? Will voters have a say in whether and how their travels are tracked? Or will they find that the decision has been made for them?

Link to article here.

Stop Your Car From Spying on You

Modern cars are smartphones on wheels, but with less protection for your data.

J.D. Tuccille |3.25.2024
Being proved right isn't always fun. Just weeks after my warning in the March issue that our modern high-tech cars are tracking us and sharing data with manufacturers, cops, and parties unknown, came a report of soaring auto insurance premiums because of snitching vehicles. The consequences get worse from there. Fortunately, there are ways to keep your snoopy ride from contacting the mothership.

Your Driving History May Be Transmitted and Stored

"Car companies are collecting information directly from internet-connected vehicles for use by the insurance industry," Kashmir Hill reported this month for The New York Times. "Sometimes this is happening with a driver's awareness and consent…. But in other instances, something much sneakier has happened."