Texas is abdicating safety to private toll road operators
Texas is abdicating safety to private toll road operators
A lengthy investigation of the deadly pile-up on the North Tarrant Express toll road in Fort Worth three years ago shows Texas transportation officials were...
Reporter Yamil Berard scoured through thousands of pages of court records, documents from the National Transportation Safety Board, and videos of that tragic day in February 2021 when 130 cars, trucks and semis piled up along a stretch of the North Tarrant Express. Early morning commuters, unaware of the black ice beneath them, crashed one after another along two lanes bound by concrete barriers on both sides. The horrific scene spanned the length of three football fields.
NTE has a winter maintenance plan in place now, the investigation found, but has fought its disclosure in civil court where dozens of plaintiffs are seeking damages. NTE claims that the plan is proprietary and shouldn’t be revealed.
How is "we're gonna salt the roads" proprietary?
That's the trick. They're not gonna.
Yeah..Freedom. have you never been to Texas? They pay low taxes or, in some cases, have none....but also outsource this type of things which is just objectively worse in everyway....but freedom?
Oh no we do pay taxes. Just not income tax. Because then the poors wouldn’t pay as much as the wealthy.
We also have like 0 public space so the only people who really have freedom are the people who own all the wide open spaces. And by people I mean corporations.
Texas is corporate feudalism.
I actually read a book by a noted libertarian economist making the case for privatizing all roads (its easier to tear down a stupid argument if you start by taking it seriously).
What I expected was, y'know, just a bad argument. Like, there would be a bunch of super positive assumptions about how a bunch of stuff would work out that just don't work in reality, that sort of thing.
What I got was quadruple decker raised glass highways with holes cut into them for rain to fall through.
No, you did not hallucinate that sentence.
That is the libertarian answer to how you solve the problems with privatizing all roads. Every road, even those in cities (especially cities) is actually four or five competing roads stacked on top of each other, owned by different companies, made of perfectly transparent glass so as not to deprive anyone living below them of their God given access to sunlight, and full of holes so as not to deprive anyone of their God given right to rain.
The author comes to this conclusion after realizing "Oh shit my libertarian homesteading fantasy doesn't work if Jeff Bezos can just build a highway over your property, but my private roads fantasy doesn't work if Jeff Bezos can just buy up a thin strip of land all the way around LA and then charge people a thousand dollars to cross it."
The best argument to toll every Interstate quality highway is that the toll revenue acts as a pretty good use tax. It is the reason why most toll highways are in better condition than free ones.
And figuring out how to fund free highways in the future is going to be a lot harder when the number of gas vehicles goes down and the gas tax, a pseudo use tax, isn't enough to fund maintenance.
< insert bike fail meme blaming Democrats for Republicans privatizing roads >
It's Texas, a one party state, so there's really nobody else to blame.
I don't even blame Dems for taking this approach in this particular instance. The Bush/Abbott state government has severely limited how cities can raise revenue and toll roads begetting more toll roads as turned the city into an absolute morass of concrete when so many other public projects go underfunded.
So it's less bike fail and more success kid, in this instance.
This irritates me because it means 1 thing: another excuse for them to jack up toll rates.
You'd think think toll rates would be tied to maintenance costs after it pays for it's construction, right? Nah, not here. It's a forever well of money for someone (and not to us tax payers). Don't drive on it you say? The number of toll roads in North Texas is now so high, you may have a 10 mile radius to the closest interstate.
Smells like libertarianism!
...or horseshit. Kinda hard to tell those two apart.
TXTAG is a blight. Whoever just bought them may be marginally better, but color me doubtful.
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