Posted on 07/29/2010 3:38:56 PM PDT by Willie Green
WASHINGTON - Anybody who uses the Dulles Greenway can tell you his commute is a costly one.
Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., wants to change that.
Wolf wrote a letter to Virginia Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton, urging Connaughton to support state legislation to roll back the tolls along the Dulles Greenway.
"I have said it before and will say it again, this is highway robbery," Wolf said.
"The Greenway is perhaps the most expensive toll road per mile in the country. This is a quality of life issue for those people living along the Greenway or who use it on a daily basis."
In the letter to Connaughton, Wolf asks the transportation secretary "to consider supporting legislation that not only rolls back the previously approved toll increases, but provides consumers with greater protections as the state considers more public-private ventures to address the Commonwealth's transportation infrastructure... In my opinion, the current law protects the interests of the owner of the toll road rather than the consumers of the road."
Base tolls go as high as $4.50 per trip. Combined with the Dulles Toll Road, some drivers are paying $10.50 a day on tolls. Wolf says people who pay these maximum tolls are spending as much money to use the road as they would spend on a monthly car payment.
Toll revenue from the road is down, partly because commuters are using Route 28 as an alternative.
Wolf also wants the Macquerie Group, the Australian company that owns the road, to put up clear and recognizable signs before the main toll plazas. He wants drivers informed of the toll rates before they access the road.
Additionally, he wants to see Connaughton appoint a task force of citizens, Virginia General Assembly members and elected officials from Loudoun, Clarke and Frederick counties and Winchester to look for ways to make the Dulles Greenway more user-friendly.
Those DC parasites can afford it. They are busy over taxing the rest of America so it’s great to see them suffer. More tolls, fees, fines taxes for them!
Right. Suppose it had always been the custom that our food was provided out of tax revenues. Then, one day, someone decided to sell food privately to those who wanted to buy it.
You'd probably still be saying --
There should be a wall between business and public functions
There is no fixed wall between the public and the private. Most cities have publicly-run fire departments, some have private companies contracted to fight fires. Some have public ambulances -- most don't.
Some places have public electric companies, some are supplied by private firms. Tell me again where the wall is.
“No one’s forcing anyone to take a toll road to get to places. If you don’t want to pay, there are plenty of roads to take into work. Yes, it may take a bit longer to get there, but you don’t have to pay out of your pocket to use it.”
Me too. It’s kind of like the old days with the telephone company - that too should have been deregulated, let them charge whatever they can get away with - have the government make damn sure that no one can come close to competing with them (in the case of toll roads, it’s non-compete clauses that prevent building or even upgrading parallel roads), and then tell the people that complain about the cost of using their phone to go use the Postal Service and send letters back and forth. LOL.
Sorry, but unlike many here, I DO have a problem with unregulated monopolies.
And then they, or their reps, sold it.
Happens every day.
Car pool. Drops cost in half. Adapt, overcome. Suck it up. Or like anything else, pay for it.
People want to live in lower costs rural areas, yet have low cost, taxpayer built highways.
OK - I got it now. You're one of those sheep who "let it go", having been governmentally hosed out of your tax dollars....maybe because it doesn't directly affect you.
Sorry that you have no balls (or "oves" if you're a hen)...you don't belong on FR. Your mindset doesn't fit here.
There can not be three roads side by side for consumers to “shop” among because that would make the country one big road. So, there is often only one road needed to serve the traffic needs and that gives the the government and the “owner” of that one road total power. The government over the road owner as he is providing a vital service to the public and the owner who has no market competition and can charge whatever the govenrment will let him get away with charging. The road owner can pay off the politican to get fee increases and no matter what, the public is now screwed.
An example of another private/public partership was Clinton telling banks that he will deregulate them if the give real estate loans to people with no money. Then the banks demanded bailouts when the scheme collapsed. That happened because the Fed, who controls the money supply is both public and private. It has the market cornered on printing money.
I said, libertarians need to look at current fascist reality and rethink and evaluate what has happened. Some services are not inherently designed to provide for a free market in supply and demand.
The road was built by Middleburg zillionaire Maggie Bryant... And many say, though paying that toll is like getting knocked over the head with a pipe wrench, the Dulles Greenway extension of 267 was built “fair and square” on freely bought land. I am disgusted by the tolls and refuse to take the toll road... But why don’t people complain instead about widening the “old” Route 7, or creating a faster route from Leesburg to the foothills of the Blue Ridge?
Watch your mouth.
Who forced you to use a road from point A. to point B. What, are their Japanese Imperial Marines with bayonets against your back?
Or did YOU CHOSE to live at A. and work at B.? Those are pretty big choices, that you made.
It’s a big country. I suspect less than 0.0002 percent of the roads are toll roads. You choosing to use two-ten thousands of a percent of road possibilities isn’t any type of ‘force’.
The road was built by Middleburg zillionaire Maggie Bryant...
Hmmmmm... very interesting!!!
In Virginia former Democratic governor Douglas Wilder was key to securing the passage of legislation that allowed the first modern era private toll road (from Dulles Airport to Leesburg in Loudon County) to get under way. At the time of this writing, the Dulles Greenway toll road is about three-quarters built and is due to open on September 29, 1995. A $325 million project, it is 14 miles of four-lane divided freeway through largely undeveloped countryside on the western fringe of the Washington metropolitan area. It will end at a small beltway around the pretty, historic town of Leesburg (population 19,000).
The area is quite ritzy real estate, northern Virginia "hunt country," not far from the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is an attractively broken landscape of farms, many now boarding horses for riders from the Washington area, between small treed hills. Interestingly, environmentalists and local officials have supported the project as a central element of a growth strategy for the county, which provides for future development to be concentrated in the Dulles-Leesburg corridor on the theory that that strategy will take development pressure off the western part of the county, which the plan intends should be kept rural. The project was supported by the powerful Piedmont Environmental Council, the group that played a large role in running a planned Disney theme park out of northern Virginia in 1994. The developers spent several million dollars satisfying environmentalists' requests, building a specially long-spanned bridge over the Goose Creek reservoir to avoid piers in the water, developing a new wetlands larger than required by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, and committing themselves to a landscaping plan that will justify the name "Greenway."
Reagan administration transit chief Ralph Stanley was the project's first chief executive, and he is credited with lobbying successfully for enabling legislation in Richmond and successfully thwarting opposition from the Virginia Department of Transportation. But Stanley was unlucky with his timing. He was ready to go with the project just as the savings-and-loan crisis and a major real estate recession hit in 1991. Stanley and Goldman Sachs, his financial consultant, could not tie down financing, and there were two abortive attempts at closing in the summers of 1991 and 1992.
The major investor that Stanley had attracted to the Dulles tollway project was Magalen Bryant, a wealthy local woman whose money comes largely from the Dover Corporation, a tire and gas pump manufacturer. She saw millions of dollars of her money going for nothing, so she pushed Stanley out and put her son, Michael Crane, in as CEO of a new holding group, Toll Road Investors Partnership (TRIP) II. That partnership broke with Goldman Sachs and went to a local firm, C.C. Pace Resources, Inc., of Fairfax, Virginia, which has specialized in novel financing for cogeneration plants and gas pipelines.
Banks would not lend for longer than about 12 years, and the project needed much longer term debt. (Because the project has to create its own traffic, it will take some years to cover operating costs, let alone debt service.) The project got rated BBB--investment grade, but barely. After many disappointments, three insurance companies--CIGNA Investments, Inc., Prudential Power Funding Associates, and John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company--finally came to the closing party in September 1993 with $258 million in 32.5-year and 29-year fixed-rate loans. And a bank group consisting of Barclay's, Nation's, and Deutsche provided construction financing and a $40 million revolving credit facility, but only after the three equity partners--Shenandoah, Bryant's family company; Autostrade SpA, an Italian toll road company; and Brown & Root, road builders in Houston--added $40 million of "standby equity" to the similar- sized cash equity they had contributed up front. Bryant, one of the driving forces behind the project from the beginning, wound up putting several tens of millions of her family assets at risk. Though he says the family is keen to do other projects, Crane says there is no way they would ever do a private highway again on the Dulles road terms, because getting that road to construction was such a protracted and cripplingly expensive business. (The project was seven years in development, and preconstruction costs were $68 million.)
So Maggie Bryant is some kind of deluded, hypocritical blue-haired heiress who wants the rest of us to pay for her environmental good works and horse farms by paying higher tolls and gas pump prices. And her nitwit son wouldn't do it again because they actually had to RISK some of their own money???
Good grief... where do these aristoctratic parasites keep coming from???
LOL!!!
Willie, toll roads are voluntary. You don’t want to ride, you don’t pay.
Your solutions are all mandatory - makes no difference whether you ride or not, you pay.
A very clear difference. And it’s obvious which most of us would pick.
Sometimes the good things in live simply cost more.
A very clear difference. And it’s obvious which most of us would pick.
Well it sure as hell ain't the fringe Libertarian losers:
'Rats : 42.6%
GOP : 32.5%
Independent : 24.8%
Constitution Party : 0.37%
Green Party pinheads : 0.31%
Libertarian kooks : 0.2%
Good grief... where do these aristoctratic parasites keep coming from???
They used to come from the ranks of communists. Now they come dressed in Libertarian clothing. According to the Libertarian religion, this unelected blue haired dictator wannbe can do anything she wants to anybody as long as she is rich enough to do it within her own empire.
Who forced you to use a road from point A. to point B. What, are their Japanese Imperial Marines with bayonets against your back?
However, blocking the use of highways in the US is rightfully considered blocking commerce. If I want to get from A to B to work, I have the constitutional right to do it on the roads.
The framers were very familiar with private roads, private bridges and river ferry’s.
You, along with everyone else, paying a standard, posted rate isn’t anymore of a commerce obstruction then paying for fuel
I’m not sure who paid for it. If it was paid with taxpayer dollars, then of course I would be pretty angry about that. I’ll look into it and find out.
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