- Questions about the Key Bridge replacement
- Win-win benefits of express toll lanes
- The problem with revenue-maximizing managed lanes
- American port inefficiency and dockworker strike
- Stockholm’s congestion tax
- The real case for driverless mobility
- Kenneth Orski, RIP
- News Notes
- Quotable Quotes
Questions About the Key Bridge Replacement
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is making an all-out effort to get 100% federal funding for the estimated $1.9 billion cost of replacing the demolished Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. As of early September, the governor and his allies were racing against the congressional clock to find some kind of pending bill to which a 100% federal-funding bridge measure could be attached. I think this effort is misguided for several reasons.
First of all, the standard approach for emergency replacement of bridges on the Interstate highway system is 90% of the replacement cost, coming out of a federal fund for this purpose. There are many claimants for the dollars available from this fund, and it’s not clear why Maryland is entitled to special treatment.
Second, the Key Bridge has always been a toll bridge, and there is no reason why the replacement shouldn’t also be a toll bridge. Some Maryland officials have been complaining about the expected four-year loss of toll revenue that the Maryland Transportation Authority (MDTA) had planned to spend on other infrastructure statewide. But those tolls were paid by Key Bridge users presumably for the capital and operating costs of that bridge. Using tolls to finance some or all of the $1.9 billion cost of the replacement bridge would continue the users-pay/users-benefit principle.
In a recent release, the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association (IBTTA), said:
“The formal designation of the I-695 corridor as an Interstate highway…federalized the bridge replacement project, extending all the limitations on revenue uses contained in Section 129 of Title 23 of the U.S. Code.”
This statement implies that there would be a federal problem with using toll financing to replace the Key Bridge. That’s false. Congress explicitly revised that section of the statute in 1991 to make clear that toll financing can be used to replace bridges on the Interstate system, regardless of whether they were tolled or not. That is how Louisiana is underway replacing the aging Calcasieu River Bridge with a toll-financed new bridge.
Also relevant to the question of who pays for the replacement bridge is the various insurers involved. As I noted in the April issue of this newsletter, Maryland itself has a $350 million insurance policy on the bridge. And cargo ship insurers have about a dozen insurance pools, such as the Brittania P&I Club.
The Wall Street Journal reported that up to $3.1 billion is available per ship disaster. Back in March, both Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) suggested using insurance proceeds to pay for the bridge replacement.
Rep. Garamendi told Bloomberg TV, “I don’t think this has to be federal taxpayer money. Let’s first go to the insurance side of it, and then we’ll see what’s left over.”
Finally, there is a moral question. If Maryland Transportation Authority is the innocent victim of an unavoidable accident, they might have a case for all American taxpayers to pay for the replacement bridge. But that is not what the record shows. First, MDTA ignored the lessons of the 1980 Sunshine Skyway bridge-collision/collapse and did not retrofit meaningful dolphins to protect the Key Bridge piers.
Second, as I reported in the April issue of this newsletter, MDTA ignored repeated warnings over the years from the Baltimore Harbor Safety and Coordination Committee about the lack of meaningful protection of the bridge piers. It was not an innocent victim of this disaster.
Win-Win Transportation Benefits of Express Toll Lanes
A 2003 Reason Foundation policy study was titled “HOT Networks: A New Plan for Congestion Relief and Better Transit.” While express toll lane projects have proliferated over the past decade, totaling more than 60 in operation across the country, not all are taking full advantage of the potential transit benefits. This may be due to state departments of transportation (which are usually the project sponsors) not being providers of transit service, which is usually always the job of local or regional transit agencies.
At this year’s annual public-private partnership (P3) conference of the American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) in July, I was pleased to see a panel devoted to bus transit service on current or planned express toll lanes in four large metro areas: Atlanta, Denver, northern Virginia, and Nashville (in the planning stage). I asked the presenters to provide details on each of these, and here is a summary of what is going on.
Atlanta has three operational express toll lane (ETL) projects (with variable tolling to manage traffic): I-85 North, I-75 North, and I-75 South. The Atlanta Transit-Link Authority operates express bus service on all three. Additional express bus service on I-85 is provided by Gwinnett County, and on I-75 North, it is provided by the Cobb County transit agency.
Express bus service in each corridor existed prior to the express toll lanes, but new services were added, and where feasible, pre-existing express bus routes shifted to the ETLs.
New express toll lanes are in the planning or procurement phase on SR-400 and the northern half of the I-285 ring road, and express bus service will exist on those ETLs also. (Thanks to Hiral Patel at Georgia Department of Transportation and Annie Gillespie at the State Road & Tollway Authority.)
Denver has 176 miles of express toll lanes in operation, and of these, 116 miles currently have express bus service. Two agencies currently provide those services. Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) contracts with Bustang and Pegasus for express bus service on I-25 north and south and on I-70. The Denver Regional Transit District (RTD) operates express bus routes on US 36 and I-25 North. Transit service in metro Denver, as in most metro areas, is still recovering from the pandemic, but CDOT reports express bus ridership growth from the 2023 fiscal year (FY) to FY24 as up 11%. And RTD reports FY21 to FY23 express bus growth of up 27% on US 36 and 11.5% on its I-25 service. (Thanks to Piper Darlington at CDOT.)
Northern Virginia (DC suburbs) has 85.5 miles of express toll lanes in operation (on I-95, I-395, I-495, and I-66 outside the beltway), and express bus service exists on all four of them. Three transit agencies—Fairfax Connector, OmniRide, and Metrobus—are the express bus operators. The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation provided most of the data but does not operate any of the bus services. Total express bus ridership post-pandemic is growing, but has not reached pre-pandemic levels. (Thanks to Susan Shaw at ATCS and Todd Horsley of the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation.).
Nashville is the location of the first of four ETL projects planned by the Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT). It will add two such lanes each way to a congested 14-mile section of I-25 southeast of Nashville. The plan to include express bus service in these new Choice Lanes increased support for the 2023 legislation that authorized the new lanes. The city of Nashville is promoting a Choose How You Move initiative that includes its planned transit improvements in the I-24 corridor. (Thanks to Bryan Ledford at TDOT).
I’m encouraged that in all four of these metro areas, both the state transportation departments and the local/regional transit agencies understand the synergy between express toll lanes and express bus service. In a number of cases where only high-occupancy vehicle lanes exist, many of them are congested during peak periods (e.g., Nashville today), so any “express” buses operating in them offer service that is little better than operating in the general-purpose lanes. It frustrates me to see the Texas Department of Transportation, for example, being forbidden to add express toll lanes on freeways being expanded in Austin and elsewhere. Substituting “HOV managed lanes” is a misleading use of the term. The synergy between express bus success and managed lanes exists only where traffic flow is managed by variable pricing.
The Problem with Revenue-Maximizing Managed Lanes
By Baruch Feigenbaum
The U.S. has more than 60 priced managed lane (MLs) projects operating from Florida to Washington and California to Maryland. But as MLs have grown and networks have developed, the transportation community has encountered new challenges that need to be addressed.
One of the biggest challenges is the growing number of MLs priced to maximize revenue. (The other type of ML pricing is called throughput-maximizing). Generally, operators of revenue-maximizing lanes set the tolls to raise the most revenue, while operators of throughput-maximizing lanes set the toll to move the most vehicles. For the most part, public agencies operate throughput-maximizing lanes while many public-private partnership (P3) companies operate revenue-maximizing lanes. Finally, few operators truly maximize revenue completely, but on a scale of 1-10 where 10 maximizes revenue, the projects are a “7” or an “8”.
The two types of managed lanes affect vehicle-throughput very differently. During peak periods, charging too high a toll can degrade the corridor. Throughput is maximized on most highway lanes at free-flow speeds of about 55 mph. Highways can handle between 2,000-2,400 vehicles per lane per hour at this speed. However, when the highway is heavily congested, traffic flow breaks down, speeds can fall to 5-10 mph, and highways can only handle 800-1,200 vehicles per lane per hour.
When ML tolls are set at a level to maximize vehicle throughput, say $0.75 per mile, they incentivize more drivers to move to the managed lanes and pay the toll. When they are set to maximize revenue, say $1.50 per mile, fewer drivers will choose the managed lanes.
Let’s do a little basic math to see how this works. One hundred solo drivers, 40 carpoolers, 10 vanpools, and two buses choose to use 10 miles of express lanes operating at level of service C (on a scale where A is free-flow speeds and F is stop and go traffic). Vehicles traverse the managed lanes at speeds of 55 miles per hour when the price is $0.75 per mile, for a total of $750 in revenue. But when the price increases to $1.50 per mile, the ML level of service improves to A, vehicles can travel 80 miles per hour, and only 60 drivers choose to use the lanes for a total of $900 in revenue. This creates more revenue for the public-private partnership company. It is a somewhat better travel experience for the commuters who choose to use the managed lane. But the general purpose (GP) lanes now operate at level of service F, throughput of the GP lanes declines by more than 50%, traffic spills out onto side streets, greenhouse gas emissions increase, and the majority of commuters have a more expensive trip or spend significantly longer using the GP lanes.
Finally, let me clarify that priced managed lanes work by varying toll rates. Some managed lanes may need to charge $1.50 per mile at peak hours to operate at 55 miles per hour. ML prices should not be capped or be flat time-of-day pricing. The problem is when ML operators charge $1.50 per mile and the lanes are 50% empty.
Complicating matters, on some priced MLs two- or three-person carpools go for free. These vehicles use the lane, regardless of the toll rate crowding out toll-paying customers. The lane price could be $20.00 per mile, and no carpools would switch to the GP lanes. Further, unlike buses and vanpools, which are legitimate high-occupancy vehicles, many carpools are simply family members riding together, especially during evenings and weekends.
There are other negative externalities from the higher prices. For example, stop-and-go traffic leads to more traffic accidents. Most of these accidents are fender benders, but they make congestion in the corridor even worse.
While it would be easy to dump on the P3 companies that have taken this approach, they are simply responding to what the state DOTs request in their request for proposals (RFPs). There is no free lunch, yet some agencies are asking P3 companies to pay for amenities that are unrelated to the project. For example, some state DOTs have received $500 million or more in direct funding from the P3 company, commitments to fund bus service, commuter rail, bicycling paths, sidewalks, and funding for transportation projects five or more miles from the corridor. That leads to a policy of revenue-maximizing.
Often political officials have non-transportation goals in mind. It is much easier to generate press for cutting the ribbon on five different projects than it is for one. And it is easier to pass along an insufficiently funded transportation program to the next administration than it is to implement a new fee, perhaps a mileage-based user fee for non-limited access highways, today. But such demands encourage managed lane companies to opt for revenue-maximizing pricing.
Just because a state DOT can ask for these projects doesn’t mean it should. The P3 companies need to make the money to pay back the construction, maintenance, and operating costs. These are not altruistic ventures. And if they must also pay for an array of other DOT projects, revenue-maximization is the way to do it.
What’s the best way to solve this problem? First, make one of the policy goals of managed lanes vehicle throughput. This does not mean that profit maximization doesn’t have some role, but it should not be the focus. Second, don’t require the P3 company to pay for non-ML projects because that requires higher toll rates. Third, proposals should be evaluated over the life of the contract, which could be 50 to 75 years. Fourth, carpools should not be allowed free access to priced managed lanes.
Public-private partnership companies bid on projects that make financial sense. State transportation departments need to protect taxpayers by making decisions that focus on the life of the project. Managed lane P3s that maximize throughput meet both objectives.
American Port Inefficiency Should Figure in Dockworker Strike Settlement
As this newsletter is being written, the Biden-Harris administration faces a dilemma: the planned International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) strike of all East Coast and Gulf Coast seaports. If the strike goes forward and plays havoc with supply chains during this fall’s elections, the administration may be blamed for not having intervened before the strike deadline of Oct. 1. But if the Biden administration does intervene, it risks a huge backlash from U.S. labor unions, whose election support it is counting on.
What the ILA is after is outrageous: a 76% increase in wages over the six-year period of a new contract. As the Journal of Commerce pointed out in a recent article, last year’s West Coast ports settlement with the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) called for only a 32% increase in its renewed contract.
The June 2024 issue of the same magazine presented a list of the world’s largest container ports based on the Container Port Performance Index, produced jointly by the World Bank and S&P Global. These are all sizeable ports, but they are listed in order of productivity, not size. The top 25 ports are nearly all in Asia, except for Cartagena in Colombia (#3), Hamad Port in Qatar (#11), and Port Said in Egypt (#16). Between the 26th and 50th ports, by productivity score, there are still no US ports, but the Western hemisphere does get Rio de Janeiro (#42) and Mexico’s Lazaro Cardenas (#50). We don’t find a single US port until we get to ports ranked from 51 to 75. The winners are Charleston (#53), Philadelphia (#55), Port Everglades (#65), Miami (#74), and Boston (#75). In the group ranked from 76 to 100, we find only Wilmington (#81), New York and New Jersey (#92) and Jacksonville (#99). Los Angeles and Long Beach do not show up anywhere in this list of 200.
A significant factor in the relatively low productivity of U.S. container ports is resistance to automation, which undoubtedly leads to the generally higher productivity of Asian and other top-50 ports. The last time longshore unions grudgingly accepted significant automation was when containerization became increasingly used by ocean carriers, as documented in Marc Levinson’s award-winning book, The Box (Princeton University Press, 2006). The great compromise in 1960 between the unions and ports led to the acceptance of containerization along with guaranteed employment until retirement age for workers no longer needed with containerization.
The United States is long overdue for another great compromise like that of 1960. Longshore unions should not get double-digit compensation increases while insisting on no automation. What ILA wants should be ignored unless its leadership and members agree to significant automation that would bring major U.S. container ports into the top-50 container ports on the Container Ports Performance Index.
Stockholm’s Congestion Tax
By Michael L. Sena
Having experienced driving in and around Stockholm for over 40 years, I can say unequivocally that the one objective Stockholm’s congestion tax did not achieve is a reduction in congestion. It is called officially a “congestion tax” because the central government determined that it is a tax, and not a fee, like parking. Therefore, since communities in Sweden cannot create new taxes, the operation of the charging system and the money collected by it are under the control of the national government, not Stockholm. The money collected is used for roads, not transit, because transit is a local responsibility, and roads are a national one—except for roads that are controlled by the communities or are private.
There was a referendum on the congestion tax scheme following a six-month trial in 2006, which was not long enough to prove anything except that the technology to read license plates actually worked. Fifteen communities in Greater Stockholm voted, and only the City of Stockholm voted in favor. The referendum was non-binding. The scheme became permanent in Aug. 2007 and operates today.
Following the institution of the Stockholm congestion tax, we pay to drive on a road system that was dimensioned for traffic in the 1980s. Stockholm’s governing policies have been based on a belief that all vehicular traffic within its boundaries would be banned because residents would not need to drive, and national government policies have been based on a belief that intelligent transportation systems would allow safer and congestion-free vehicular movement without the need to build new roads. Both have been shown to lack a firm foundation in reality. All national north-south traffic on the E4 motorway has had to pass through Stockholm because of a refusal by government officials to believe that a bypass around the city was necessary. Vehicles passing through Stockholm traveling in either direction have been forced to share the road with vehicles that have Stockholm as their destination, and the result has been increased traffic congestion on the single motorway carrying that traffic.
The Stockholm congestion tax has done nothing to alleviate the congestion, but it did result in the political establishment agreeing to build the bypass for north-south traffic. It is called E4 Förbifart (bypass) Stockholm. It should have been completed a few dozen years ago. It has been under construction (in part with money raised from the congestion tax) since 2016, and it is due to open for traffic in 2030. When that opens, we shall see how it affects the amount of traffic on the current road system. What the cities and the national road authority in Sweden have not done, and are still not planning to do, is build multi-modal park-and-ride centers, apparently because this would encourage driving. But perhaps, like the bypass which finally was accepted as a good idea, this penny will drop.
Michael L. Sena is the editor and publisher of the international transportation newsletter The Dispatcher.
Book Review: The Real Case for Driverless Mobility
By Marc Scribner
Earlier this year, a new book was published making The Real Case for Driverless Mobility (Elsevier, 2024). Princeton University professor Alain Kornhauser and longtime transportation technology consultant Michael Sena provide a detailed overview of not only automated vehicles (AVs) but of the historical role of transportation in society. They then argue that an important promise of automated driving system technology is to enhance access to employment and social opportunities of the transportation-poor—or, as they put it in their book’s subtitle, Putting Driverless Vehicles to Use for Those Who Really Need a Ride.
Kornhauser and Sena (K&S) are no strangers to those who follow AV developments. Kornhauser’s SmartDrivingCar newsletter and Sena’s The Dispatcher newsletter have entered their second decades, and both offer informative and entertaining analysis at the bleeding edge of automotive technology. Kornhauser and Sena’s book is written in a style familiar to readers of their newsletters, blending engaging storytelling with trenchant technology assessments—and refreshingly free of jargon. Many of the book’s chapters begin with K&S recounting discussions that took place at the annual SmartDrivingCars Summits held at Princeton.
The book is organized into 10 chapters, each with the same structural elements: an introduction, overview of key principles, appraisal of current conditions, future predictions, and concluding with a summary of takeaways. The book opens with an examination of how automobiles became the dominant mode of transportation today, which is in part a crash course in Western Civ.
Kornhauser and Sena note that improving artillery “made simple walls around towns obsolete” and led to the first wave of “urban sprawl” in Europe. Sprawl accelerated following the Industrial Revolution, as the more affluent fled dense and polluted city centers for more bucolic environs on the urban periphery, migration that was eventually supported by the first mass transit systems. Rather than causing sprawl, as critics so often argue, the development of affordable automobiles merely democratized a long-standing trend that had been initiated by the wealthy seeking “breathing space, a green spot of land adjacent to the house, a place with a view of trees and water that was not polluted.”
The outflow of middle-income households from central cities in the 20th century was followed by the dispersal of jobs into the suburbs. Lower densities increasingly required high-speed automobile transportation to access the destinations people wanted to reach. Since the 1960s, a large focus of urban transportation policy has been on how to help those who have been left behind. Too often, this has meant lavish subsidies for conventional fixed-route mass transit. This strategy has largely failed to connect people unable to afford suburban living and private automobile transportation with the employment and social opportunities that were now scattered throughout the broader metropolitan area.
With these spatial and demographic trends in mind, Kornhauser and Sena urge a rethinking of public transit to better serve the transportation-poor. They examine improvements to conventional transit that escape the confines of the fixed route—namely on-demand shuttles—but find “microtransit” solutions lacking due to their high operating costs. As with all forms of transit, operating costs are mostly attributable to labor, leading K&S to conclude that the only way to offer better transportation to “those who really need a ride” is to eliminate the role of the human driver.
The next several chapters examine the technology readiness of AVs, how and where they can operate, the advancements of various component and complementary technologies, and the business and policy landscapes. K&S make the important point that at least three actors will be involved in making affordable AVs a reality: those that develop the core automated driving system (ADS) technology, those that incorporate ADS technology into vehicles, and those that will provide the driverless transportation services. Some ADS developers, such as Waymo and Zoox, have aimed to deliver on two if not three of those tasks. Others, such as Uber—with its focus on providing the ride-hail network but having little involvement in ADS or vehicle development—plan to take on one.
This point reminded me of the late economist William J. Baumol’s The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship, which studies the important role of what he calls the “innovative entrepreneur” in market economies. Innovation breakthroughs are often driven by individual inventors or small entrepreneurial firms. These inventions are frequently acquired by large established firms, who then commercialize them for consumers. Think of the evolution of Orville and Wilbur’s Wright Flyer to the Boeing 787s operated by American Airlines today.
Contra the prediction of economist Joseph Schumpeter who argued that the role of the entrepreneur would be minimized by large innovative firms, Baumol shows that large firms are able to effectively outsource breakthrough innovations to entrepreneurs. This allows these major companies to specialize in making the incremental improvements needed to meet consumer demand and compete in the marketplace. The upshot is that we should not expect the current crop of developers of core ADS technologies to pursue the types of transportation service offerings that K&S propose in the last quarter of their book.
The concluding chapter is the longest and sketches a service model they call the Mobility Opportunity—Vehicle Equity Systems (MOVES). MOVES is designed to serve the transportation-poor in urban areas, with Trenton, New Jersey, as the case study. The MOVES service provider would procure driverless shuttles to operate point-to-point on surface streets between standardized stops they call “kiosks.” From the kiosks, residents would hail a shuttle that could take them directly to any of the other kiosks. The purpose of the kiosks is to allow for uniform vehicle docking to facilitate easy access for the disabled and promote “casual ridesharing,” which they analogize to elevators.
This approach can be contrasted to a driverless transportation model being advocated by a company called Glydways, which I discussed in the June 2023 issue of this newsletter. Glydways is rubber-tire personal rapid transit (PRT) that makes use of specialized vehicles traveling on dedicated fixed guideways. Sharing is entirely at the discretion of the person ordering the ride, unlike Kornhauser and Sena’s proposed service model, where sharing is encouraged as a cost-saving measure.
Glydways claims it can achieve operating costs as low as 25 cents per passenger-mile, but this excludes the capital costs associated with dedicated infrastructure and purpose-built vehicles. K&S believe their model could potentially support costs below 50 cents per passenger-mile, all-in. If realized, both approaches would offer substantial cost savings over conventional public transit while enhancing accessibility relative to the alternatives. But the MOVES model, which eschews fixed guideways, is much more flexible and much less capital-intensive than the Glydways PRT approach.
As Kornhauser and Sena explain, there is a massive accessibility gulf between conventional transit and private auto transportation. The University of Minnesota’s Access Across America series finds that drivers in the 50 largest U.S. metro areas can on average access more than 30 times as many jobs as transit riders in 30 minutes of travel (33% of potential jobs vs. 1%). Deploying K&S’s MOVES service at scale would fall somewhere in between, but would that be enough to meaningfully enhance employment and social opportunities for the previously transit-dependent? I’m not so sure. Door-to-door robotaxi service would be a great opportunity equalizer, but robotaxis as affordable as the MOVES service envisioned by K&S are many years away.
Kornhauser and Sena make a provocative and thoughtful contribution to the AV discussion. The Real Case for Driverless Mobility should be required reading for anyone interested in the future of urban transportation, whether you’re an automated vehicles expert or a robo-rookie.
I was sad to learn that my long-time transportation friend and colleague passed away on Aug. 8. Ken had already had an impressive public policy career before I met him in the early 1990s. Harvard Law School, Atomic Energy Commission, and a position at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, prior to joining the Urban Mass Transportation Administration in 1974 as associate administrator for programs and policy and then a stint at the German Marshall Fund. In 1982, Orski established his own consulting firm, Urban Mobility Corp. In 1989 he began its monthly newsletter, Innovation Briefs, to which I eagerly subscribed. Ken’s wide-ranging knowledge about an array of transportation ideas and projects deepened my interest in focusing more of my own policy research on transportation.
I don’t recall how or when we met—likely at a transportation conference, probably the Transportation Research Board annual meeting. We became friends, and he got very interested in the emerging phenomenon of high-occupancy toll lanes as an improvement over HOV lanes. That led to us co-authoring a 1999 Reason policy study, “Making a Case for HOT Lanes.” Several years later, as more high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes were being implemented, I talked with Ken about the larger potential of networks of HOT lanes, which led to our second collaboration, the 2003 Reason policy study, “HOT Networks: A New Plan for Congestion Relief and Better Transit.” It included sketch-level plans for such networks in the Atlanta, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. metro areas. I’m sure Ken was as pleased as I am that such networks are being developed in all eight areas. When we released that study, Ken set up meetings to brief senior people at federal transportation agencies and industry organizations, drawing on his large network of transportation contacts.
For many years Ken and I kept in touch via email. I was dismayed when Innovation Briefs ceased publication in 2015. In hindsight, I’m sure his newsletter inspired me to begin this newsletter, Surface Transportation Innovations, in 2002. Ken evidently retired from transportation policy when the newsletter ended, and I’ve missed exchanging ideas with him in recent years. Until learning from his obituary that he was born in 1932, I had not realized that Ken had reached the age of 92.
Goodbye, dear friend, and thanks for all that you have contributed to the world, and especially to transportation.
—Bob Poole
Georgia DOT Timeline for I-285 East Express Lanes P3
On Aug. 29, the Georgia Department of Transportation unveiled its timeline for procuring a long-term DBFOM revenue-risk concession for its largest-ever P3 procurement: adding 30 route miles of express toll lanes to I-285 East in Atlanta. It has issued its request for qualifications and plans to release a draft request for proposals to the best-qualified teams in the first quarter of 2025. The project will include connections to existing express lanes on I-85 and SR 400. Phase 1 of this project is expected to cost between $2.6 and $3.1 billion. After construction, the developer/operator will be responsible for 50 years of operation and maintenance.
$2.1 Billion Louisiana P3 Bridge to Start Construction
After reaching financial close on Aug. 15, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development gave the green light to the P3 consortium led by Plenary Americas to begin preparations for construction. The 50-year concession is financed largely by toll revenues from the project, which will replace the 70-year-old four-lane I-10 bridge across the Calcasieu River with a state-of-the-art eight-lane bridge plus approach roads, totaling 5.5 miles. Tolls will not be collected until the new bridge is open to traffic. The design-build contractor is an ACCIONA/Sacyr joint venture. The two companies are equity members of the consortium, along with Plenary.
Tennessee Timeline for First Choice Lanes P3
Tennessee DOT plans to issue its Request for Qualifications (RFQ) for the I-24 Choice Lanes project in November. The 26-mile project will add express toll lanes to that congested Interstate between Nashville and Murfreesboro. TDOT will hold a pre-bid event in mid-October, followed by one-on-one meetings with potential P3 teams. Assisting TDOT with the procurement are HNTB, KPMG, and Hunton Andrews Kurth. The P3 is planned as a revenue-risk DBFOM. The state legislature has authorized four Choice Lanes projects, of which the I-24 project is the first.
Toyota Plans to Focus on Hybrids
A report from Reuters cites two Toyota officials saying the company will focus on producing hybrids as it phases out internal combustion engine vehicles for North America in coming years. “Going forward, we plan to evaluate, car line by car line, whether going all-hybrid makes sense,” David Christ, head of sales and marketing for Toyota North America, told Reuters. Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda in January discussed a multi-pathway strategy that may include hydrogen-fueled vehicles, green fuels, and possibly other technologies.
North Carolina DOT Finds More Roles for Highway P3s
Infralogic (Aug. 29) reported that the North Carolina Department of Transportation has assessed conventional versus P3 procurement for two important projects: the Mid-Currituck Bridge and I-77 South express toll lanes. On the latter, the agency on Aug. 21 presented the results of its comparative analysis of conventional and P3 procurement to the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization (CRTPO): “The I-77 South express lanes comparative analysis shows a traditional NC Turnpike Authority project delivery would not currently be feasible, due to rising costs and funding constraints.” The CRTPO board deferred making a decision for 30 days, pending further details from NCDOT.
First Nevada Toll Road Proposed
On Aug. 12, the Sparks City Council unanimously approved a draft bill for the 2025 state legislative session to authorize a 13-mile toll road to alleviate commuting congestion in the I-80 corridor. The estimated cost is $500 million. The new road would cut the commute time in half for those now using congested I-80 to go to and from work in the Reno/Taho Industrial Center. Toll roads are not currently authorized in Nevada.
California HSR Authority Approves Another Link
Engineering News-Record reports that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has voted to approve the route and certify the environmental review of the Palmdale to Burbank portion of the planned Los Angeles to San Francisco route. The 38.3-mile route, the majority of it in tunnels beneath the San Gabriel Mountains, has an estimated cost of $22.6 billion. Not mentioned in the article is that the rail authority has no plans for where to obtain that staggering sum. Its current starter segment, 171 miles in mostly flat terrain in the Central Valley, is far short of funding for its current estimated price tag of $33 billion, despite a recent $3 billion federal grant.
50,000 Miles of Autonomous Trucking for J.B. Hunt and Kodiak Robotics
During the first half of 2024, Hunt Transport Services has shipped Bridgestone tires from Atlanta to Dallas using Kodiak Robotics driverless trucks. The tires are produced at Bridgestone’s Graniteville plant in South Carolina and hauled conventionally to a Kodiak hub near Atlanta. Kodiak autonomous trucks with safety drivers deliver the loads to another Kodiak hub south of Dallas. From there, conventional trucks take them to a nearby Bridgestone distribution center. J.B. Hunt identifies alternative cargo for the return trip from Dallas to Atlanta. The story was covered by FreightWaves on Aug. 7.
Express Toll Lanes Continue to Increase
Ten miles of express toll lanes on I-10 near Ontario, California, opened just in time for the Labor Day weekend. The new lanes extend from the Los Angeles County line on the west to just before the interchange with I-15. When two additional construction phases are completed, the I-10 express lanes in San Bernardino County will total 33 miles. Nearing completion in six months will be two express toll lanes each way on the replacement (I-275) Howard Frankland Bridge in the Tampa, Florida, area. Also, the addition of express toll lanes on I-485 in Charlotte is due for completion by late-summer 2025.
Triangle Expressway Opens an 18-mile Section
The North Carolina Turnpike Authority on Aug. 27 opened the first of two final segments of the Triangle Expressway in the Raleigh metro area. The 18-mile section that is now in use will leave only the final 10 miles in the 540 Outer Loop to be constructed, with completion expected in 2028.
Texas DOT Finalizes SH 288 Buyback
Infralogic (Aug. 23) reported that TxDOT announced that day the imminent purchase of the P3 concession that developed and has been operating express toll lanes on SH 288 in the Houston metro area. TxDOT plans unspecified reductions in the variable toll rates and the addition of a general-purpose lane each way in the corridor. TxDOT operates another express toll lane project, on I-35 East in the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area.
Major Motorway P3 in the Czech Republic
On Aug. 7, the Czech Ministry of Transport issued a Request for Qualifications for a 60 km upgrade of the D35 motorway. The project will include the construction of two tunnels on the motorway. Responses to the RFQ are due Sept. 25, and up to four teams will be prequalified in Jan. 2025. The project will be financed via availability payments, as noted in an article in Infralogic (Aug. 7). The country’s first highway P3 was for the D4 motorway, won by a consortium of Meridian and Vinci.
Houston Gets Major TxDOT Highway Funding
The Houston Chronicle reported that TxDOT’s 10-year $104 billion unified transportation program includes major funding for additions to Houston’s I-45 and I-10, with $9.9 billion planned for Houston roads. That will include the first half of the projects planned for the $11 billion reconstruction of I-45 and $2.6 billion for I-10, including extending the Katy managed lanes inside Loop 610, extending I-10 managed lanes in Fort Bend County, and rebuilding the I-10 bridges across the San Jacinto River.
What Role for Post-Covid Rail Transit?
With the dramatic increase in working from home leading to nationwide declines in transit ridership, some voices are calling for a rethink of transit’s role. The Denver Gazette carried a detailed critique of the metro area transit system (RTD) by Randal O’Toole of the Independence Institute, “RTD’s Ride to Nowhere.” Instead of building more rail lines, O’Toole urged RTD to add express toll lanes for regionwide express bus service, to better accommodate actual anywhere-to-anywhere commuting patterns (vs. RTD’s downtown-focused system). And in the San Francisco Bay Area, BART board member Debora Allen, in a commentary for the San Jose Mercury News, called for BART to rethink its operations and spending plans rather than promoting additional ballot measures calling for more money but no change in expansion plans. This piece is also well worth reading.
Brazilian State Offers $1 Billion Highway Concession
The state of Mato Grosso do Sul is planning to offer a P3 concession for a 540-mile highway project, with an estimated capital cost of $1 billion. Infralogic reports (Aug. 16) that the state’s P3 unit expects to offer a 30-year concession for the project on the Sao Paulo B3 stock exchange in December. The project will involve upgrading five existing highways, adding lanes in both directions along two segments of the overall 540 miles. The route will link the state capital primarily to important agricultural regions.
Indiana DOT Completes I-69 Missing Link
The $2 billion project to build the last unbuilt segment of I-69 in Indiana has been completed ahead of schedule. With that link now open, I-69 extends from Evansville to Indianapolis, where I-69 already continued on through Michigan to the Canadian border at Port Huron. A number of planned but unbuilt segments of I-69 still exist in Texas and several other states south of the Indiana border.
New Zealand Will Seek Private Investment in Transportation Infrastructure
A new Revenue Action Plan, released last month by the New Zealand government, calls for implementing P3s to leverage private-sector capital and innovation. The plan also aims to reform tolling legislation to generate additional highway investment, implement new funding tools, including value capture, and transition all light vehicles to road user charges by as early as 2027.
Indian State Mandates Cattle-Free Toll Roads
The public works department of the central India state of Madhya Pradesh has issued a requirement that highway toll plaza operators in Bhopal must form patrolling teams to make toll highways “cattle-free.” Apparently, the state’s toll roads are not fenced off from livestock because the directive requires the patrolling teams to chase away stray cattle. The teams must be equipped with a hydraulic vehicle to lift and transport injured or dead cattle to the state’s Animal Husbandry department.
“For discretionary grants, like the one [Pennsylvania’s] I-83 bridge received, the problem is that federal grant programs, for good reason, try to target the projects with the greatest need, but that creates a perverse incentive for state and local governments. Those that do nothing to address their infrastructure problems will tend to have the greatest needs, and thus attract more federal spending. Everyone knows that ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease,’ but for discretionary funding programs it is actually the broken wheel that gets the grant.”
—Michael Bennon, “Obstruction Pays? Big Federal Grant for I-83 Bridge Replacement in PA,” Public Works Financing, July 2024
“The initial market for EVs was overwhelmingly composed of upper-income liberals. A CalMatters analysis from 2023 found that EV registrations in California are overwhelmingly concentrated in the wealthiest zip codes in the state. A UC Berkeley study from the same year found that close to half the EVs registered nationally over the last decade were clustered in the top 10% of the most Democratic counties nationally and over a third in the top 5%. There is only so much market share to be captured if that share is limited to rich coastal liberals. As that market has saturated over the last several years, growth in the share of EVs in the U.S. new-vehicle market has flatlined.”
—Ted Nordhaus, “Could Climate Hawks Dream of Hybrid Vehicles?” The Breakthrough Journal, Aug. 7, 2024
“The Federal Highway Administration continues to pursue its final rule to force a greenhouse gas performance measure on state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations, despite lacking the statutory authority to do so. As I have said many times in this subcommittee, this policy was considered and disposed of during negotiations of the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act. Two federal courts issued opinions earlier this year finding the rule exceeds the Administration’s statutory authority. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas went so far as to vacate the rule.”
—Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR), “Crawford Opening Statement from Hearing on DOT’s Regulatory Agenda,” House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure, July 24, 2024