On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 07:43:51PM -0700, Tim May wrote:
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.
There are two roads: The Dulles Toll Road, which connects I-66 (near the Beltway) with Dulles Airport, and the Dulles Greenway, which continues northwest away from the city to end in Leesburg. We've been talking about the Greenway. There's a map here: http://www.dullesgreenway.com/cgi-bin/dgmap.cfm I take the Dulles Toll Road whenever I fly out of that airport, but have only taken the Dulles Greenway once or twice (the only people I know in the area are north of Leesburg, and it's easier to connect through Point of Rocks in Maryland). So I'm not really all that familiar with it. A quick search, though, turns up this, which shows that the Greenway was a government project accomplished through eminent domain, that it is run by a private contractor and will return to state control in a few decades, and that it's subject to continued aggressive regulation from local governments. http://www.americancityandcounty.com/ar/government_making_inroads_private/
On the other side of the country, the Dulles Greenway, a 15-mile extension of the Dulles Toll Road, connects the Beltway (I-495) around Washington, D.C., with Dulles International Airport... That profitability, plus growth in the nearby suburbs, convinced Virginia to build the extension. Its DOT, however, decided not to build a public road and awarded the franchise to the Toll Road Corporation of Virginia (TRCV). The TRCV will operate the Greenway for 40 years, after which the road becomes state property... The Greenway, meanwhile, is subject to utility-style regulation by the state's corporation commission with a target return on equity of 21 percent... The road also has been subject to extensive regulation. For example, Greenway officials wanted to raise the speed limit on the road from 55 to 65 miles per hour, an approval process that took substantial time and required an act of the Virginia legislature. Furthermore, state regulators and lenders have to approve toll restructuring.
Not a good example of a privately-owned and privately-built road. -Declan