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State governments are transiting away from contributing general funds (taxes) toward a user fee based system. Some may see this as a means to lighten the responsibility for state government. Others, myself included, take the view that burden sharing is required. Some fees can be raised. Some economies achieved. In the end, however, the State must shoulder some of the "burden."
In California, for instance, our 270 state parks return $4.2 billion each year by way of taxes, revenues to the general fund, and economic activity to the local economies. In fact, it is the more rural economies, where high unemployment relative to the state as a whole and low per household incomes are most felt. Local communities rely on their state parks.
TransUrban to dispose of U.S. toll road, profits tank 51%
Transurban mulls disposal of U.S. toll road
FY profit down 51% to A$54.9M, distribution guidance disappoints; shares fall 1.5%
By Ross Kelly
Wall Street Journal
SYDNEY--Transurban Group (TCL.AU) said Tuesday it's mulling the disposal of a U.S. toll road that drove a 51% slide in its annual profit and indicated its robust Australian assets aren't invincible to softer economic conditions at home.
The Pocahontas Parkway in the southern part of Virginia state was constructed in anticipation of...
Read more here (access for subscribers only).
Wider highways safer
When dollar signs are involved, even TxDOT will cram toll lanes inside medians and takeover shoulders putting safety at risk to make a buck. Not only is the Virginia DOT ignoring these facts on its I-95 project, the Central Texas Mobility Authority is also ignoring this TTI study when it will squeeze toll lanes on MoPac in Austin, requiring 9 safety design exceptions to do it.
Texas Study Finds Wider Highways Safer, Virginia Narrows Roads
Texas Transportation Institute concludes wider roads are safer, while Virginia narrows lanes so it can impose tolls on Interstate 95.
The Newspaper.com
August 15, 2012
An forthcoming study by the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) found highway widening projects increased safety in the Lone Star State. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) tasked TTI to evaluate a broad range of safety improvements undertaken by the agency, but researchers decided to offer a preview last week of one of TxDOT's most effective programs."The agency's roadway widening initiative has been a tremendous success, both for increasing safety on Texas highways and potentially saving billions of dollars associated with fatal crashes and sustained injuries," TxDOT Executive Director Phil Wilson said in a statement.
A total of 1159 miles of highway shoulders were added to narrow, two-lane highways. A comparison of accident rates three years before the improvements and three years after showed fatalities were reduced by an average of 44 per year, according to TTI. Another TxDOT project spent spent $29 million on 37 widening projects that yielded an average reduction of five fatalities per year.
A similar study by the University of California published in 2008 concluded, "Collision rates diminish with an increase in shoulder width" (view study). Given the results, TxDOT said it would continue widening roads.
Virginia, on the other hand, just signed a $1 billion project to narrow lanes on Interstate 95 between Garrisonville and Edsall road outside Alexandria. Governor Bob McDonnell (R) last week held a groundbreaking ceremony for the conversion of the I-95 high-occupancy vehicle lanes into a toll road owned by the Australian firm Transurban. Three reversible toll lanes will be squeezed into the space that currently provides two reversible lanes that are twelve feet wide with generous ten-foot shoulders on each side. This will be done by narrowing the lanes to eleven feet wide with shoulders narrowed in some areas to just two feet on one side and nine feet on the other.
The project includes provisions for expanded bus service using the lanes. A typical transit bus is 8.5 feet wide, with side-view mirrors extending another foot in each direction, leaving just half-an-inch of space. A 1996 Transportation Research board study recommended traffic lanes used by buses should be no narrower than twelve feet wide.
Corporate secrecy in public projects
Link to article here.
15 August 2012
Lift the veil of corporate secrecy on public projects and save the taxpayer
By Professor Vivek Chaudhri
The Conversation
Monash University
The $1.4 billion cost blowout reported by the NBN Co last week has focused attention once again on the seemingly regular occurrence of large government infrastructure projects being delivered late and over budget.
Whether we look at the much touted Public Private Partnerships (PPP) frameworks championed by state and federal governments of all persuasions, or in the NBN Co. case, a government monopoly engaging with the private sector, the cost to the taxpayer invariably appears to be greater than first estimated.
Why might that be? Is it that we are systematically poor (in one direction) at estimating future costs? Or do political realities and parameters change? That there is a lot of risk and uncertainty in the world around us is certainly true, but why must it always be the case that the taxpayer is left with the “bill”?
High speed rail plan gets resurrected at Irving conference
Link to article here.
This High Speed Rail (HSR) plan is part and parcel of the original Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) concept. While the backers promise no taxpayer money will be involved, TxDOT is already expending untold amounts of money and resources at it through developing a rail plan and various taxpayer-funded studies. Rick Perry also promised the TTC wouldn't use any taxpayer money, and more than $90 million was expended before it's 'official' repeal last year. But it's these HSR plans, along with other multi-modal links to inland ports, and major trade corridors like Interstate 69, where the TTC lives on under a different name.
Buyer beware! Texans didn't like a foreign company, Spain-based Cintra, controlling our infrastructure in these public private partnerships for the TTC, so the prospect of a Japanese company engaging in another public private partnership (PPP) for HSR, is no less controversial. PPPs are NOT private. The word public is in there for a reason, usually for taxpayer subsidies, eminent domain, non-compete clauses, fare or toll collection, and/or access to taxpayer-backed low interest loans. Naturally, as Cintra did, they hire some big local names, former politicians like Gary Fickes and Robert Eckels and they think it'll quell Texas' aversion to foreign-ownership of infrastructure. It's a states rights and state sovereignty issue that special interests and big business just fail to understand.
Private Firm Planning Bullet Trains in Texas by 2020
IRVING – The leaders of Texas Central High-Speed Railway sound very confident for a company expecting to succeed where scores of state planners, elected officials and private interests have failed.
The firm hopes to have bullet trains moving Texans at 205 miles per hour between Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston by 2020.
The bit that has raised eyebrows: The company plans to do it without seeking public financing.
“We are not the traditional state-run railroad,” Robert Eckels, the company's president and a former Harris County judge, said at a high-speed rail forum in Irving on Tuesday. “This is designed to be a profitable high-speed rail system that will serve the people of these two great cities and in between and, ultimately, the whole state of Texas.”
Backing the Texas-based company is a group led by Central Japan Railway Company, which handles more than 100 million passengers each year on its bullet trains in Japan.
TX roads getting beat up by trucks in shale boom
Link to article here.
Not only does fracking pose property rights issues due to Rule 37, and health risks due to contaminated water, it also means taxpayers are likely to foot the majority of the bill from the damage being done to our roads by the trucks transporting oil across the state.
What Texas Can Do About Roads Damaged By Drilling
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Trucks with the natural gas industry drive through the countryside earlier this year in Springville, Pennsylvania.
With the good can also come the bad, and that’s certainly been the case with the drilling boom going on in various parts of Texas these days. As drillers use thousands of trucks — hauling millions of gallons of water and other supplies to rigs — roads inevitably suffer. Naturally, people are questioning who is going to be responsible for repairing them.
Phil Wilson, executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), talked to the Texas Tribune about the issue. He says that to drill a well, it takes some 1,200 trucks. And then it takes another 300 trucks each year just to maintain it. The impact of all those trucks is equivalent of 8 million cars annually.
And those roads — built in the fifties and sixties — weren’t constructed for heavy use, Wilson tells the Tribune. “They were built as farm-to-market roads for country trucks and for agriculture,” he says. “They weren’t built for 18-wheelers … so a road was built for 25 years and you get that level of traffic, it can diminish it down to six or seven years.” Damage from drilling trucks in the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas alone was recently estimated at $2 billion by TxDOT.
Loop 9, road to DFW inland port, on fastrack ahead of Panama Canal expansion
Link to article here.
Road to inland port on fast track ahead of Panama Canal expansion
The Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) lives on. Texas officials and transportation industry leaders gathered in Irving for the annual Texas Transportation Summit to examine how to move people and goods faster. One of the hot topics was to fast track the Loop 9 project just south of Dallas -- a project that’s part of the original Trans Texas Corridor due to its strategic connection to the International Inland Port of Dallas. The TTC is the Texas leg of the NAFTA superhighways designed to achieve the economic integration of the United States with Canada and Mexico through trade.
Though officials gave lip service to moving people faster, it was clear the real goal of the conference was to get the coming influx of imported goods moving faster in anticipation of the Panama Canal expansion opening in 2014. Loop 9 would connect trade traffic coming up from the Port of Houston on Interstate 45 with the inland port outside Dallas as well as access from I-35E.
One of the advantages of inland ports is the ability to move the task of sorting and processing international cargo through customs inland, as well as create hubs that optimize logistics and distribution of foreign-made goods. Often referred to as an intermodal transfer, an inland port can serve as a distribution center to off-load containers from one mode of transportation to another, ie - from rail to truck. Inland ports also usually reside in markets outside urban areas, reducing labor and property costs.