I've read about the 91 express lanes and their infamous no-compete clause prior to being purchased back by California, but none of the articles I read ever mentioned which company actually built them. Was it actually Cintra?
The Herald Democrat ^ | February 13, 2005 | Kathy Williams
Posted on 02/14/2005 9:23:25 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Making tacks
By Kathy Williams
Herald Democrat
4) If you think that is high, another experiment with a private monopoly being allowed to charge whatever it wanted was done in California. In that case, 2 toll lanes (each way, 10 miles long) were added to the totally packed SH-91 freeway, east of Los Angeles. The toll lane operator actually prevented the state from doing a badly-needed upgrade of a nearby state-owned highway section (using its monopoly clause). It got so ugly, that Orange County had to buy the toll lanes, just to be able to do the upgrade. By the way, those lanes now charge 70 cents per mile, for cars, at peak drive times.
http://www.91expresslanes.com/tollschedules.asp http://bicycleaustin.info/rogerbaker/tollroad-failure.html (read the LA Times article, just over halfway down – ignore the rest of the page, it’s a left-wing site)