On Friday, May 9, 2003, at 03:00 PM, BobCat wrote:
From: "Tim May"
This private toll road would be very hard to build in any other place,
Not impossible, though:
http://www.dullesgreenway.com/cgi-bin/dginfo.cfm
The Dulles Greenway is a privately owned 14-mile toll road that connects Washington Dulles International Airport with Leesburg, Virginia. The Greenway is the first private toll road in Virginia since 1816. Since the Greenway's dedication on September 29th 1995, commuters have enjoyed a non-stop alternative to Routes 7 and 28.
If I'm not mistaken--and I haven't done any Googling on this--the new toll road is next to the older and still operating road. (I have not been on the Dulles Access Road since 1991, but I recall the private toll road was under construction next to it, on the same right of way.) I spent most of the 60s in the Langley/Fairfax area, and I took travelled the Dulles Access Road many times. The original "right of way" was of course obtained by condemning hundreds of properties in the 1950s to make way for the Dulles Access Road. Burbclaves like Reston and Herndon later grew up on either side of the condemned right of way, and had only limited connections to each other. If the new toll road is using the original condemned right of way, then my point stands. The new developers presumably bribed the right officials and contributed to the right election campaigns so as to piggyback on the original statist action. If the new toll road is NOT on the orginal right of way, and passes through the various neighborhoods like Herndon, Reston, and Vienna, then I would be very interested in just how they bought up thousands of houses, cut through dozens of surface streets, and generally cut a new swathe through a suburban area. --Tim May