Posted on 06/12/2017 10:59:41 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
HOUSTON - The teachers at Spring Forest Middle School asked KHOU 11's Verify team whether Beltway 8 has been paid off and if the tolls will ever go away in the foreseeable future.
"Why do we still pay for toll roads?" wondered 7th grade teacher Rebecca Mustachio. "To be honest, I thought we would be done paying for toll roads."
We are not even close to paying the bill for those roads, according to Roxana Sibrian of the Harris County Toll Road Authority.
In a statement emailed to KHOU, the authority says it will be paying off construction debt until at least the year 2049. That doesn't include the cost of new construction projects as the county's mobility needs continue to grow.
HCTRA says construction of Beltway 8 and the Hardy Toll Road costs $2.5 billion, and even after that is paid off, tolls will continue to be collected to pay for maintenance.
(Excerpt) Read more at khou.com ...
maintaining highways is yugely expensive.
gas taxes don’t cover even 1/2 of maintaince costs.
driving ain’t free, be prepared to pay a lot more for driving.
Tollways are designed to generate revenue in perpetuity. The tollway in northern Indiana that was built long before I was born is still raking in the dough!
Ha ha. Toll roads were to pay for themselves after 15-20 years and then magically be maintained out of other sources of public revenue. 50 years later...... Guess what, it’ll never happen, because almost every time a tax/toll/fee is enacted, it doesn’t go away, it gets larger and goes on forever. Why is that? Because governments and their services (and their graft, corruption, pensions, etc.) only get bigger. Especially when they convince the dumb voters “the other guy is paying for it.” Politicians lying to you about your taxes and how their spent? Who’d a thought.....
Politicians can't bear to do away with a cash cow.
this is why one never, ever votes for taxes...especially those that give taxing authority “as needed” to govt statist...
The fact that there is an interstate system at all provides the States with simply massive revenues. Tolls are just another excuse for an incompetent looter government to fill bureaucrat pockets.
Lots of govt employees on the FR these days defending their rice bowls.
Tolls will go away just like the 1876 temporary tax on telephones has.
I don’t know what your game is, but you are on FR posting bizarrely in two areas:
1) Denying that Islam is a threat and bizarrely claiming that Muslims are nothing more threatening than “tribal” Greeks, Irish, etc.
2) Pushing full privatization particularly of roads, with such ungrounded claims as yesterday posting to me that any public company board of directors operates and makes decisions based on a 40-50 year horizon.
40-50 year time horizons are definitely how Company Boards think. Naturally, closer in time periods have greater weight. However, the NPV time horizon of Company Boards is measured in decades.
You think someone approving construction of a new factory or office building is thinking short term ?
The further down one goes in company management the shorter the time frame until one gets to front line supervisors who think in terms of a couple of shifts.
Board members are almost universally in the latter part of their careers, they are often pals of the CEO, who is looking at annual compensation-tied goals more than anything and more than anything is smoothing things quarter to quarter.
Sure, there’s an occasional debt and investment issue that is justified over decades, but that is not the actual mindset of such folks. And in the tech world? Then three years is a long-term plan.
“When the Oakland Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco with Oakland was built, the public was promised that the tolls would be phased out once the bridge was paid for. Although it has been paid for many times over, the tolls remain continue to increase.”
Yes, and those initial tolls were 25 cents! Now, half if that bridge has been replaced because it “wasn’t earthquake safe,” and the tolls are $6.00! And thanks to the lack of off-ramp infrastructure on both ends, at commute time it’s almost complete gridlock.
Agreed that we have some serious challenges via a vie the ‘owner-agent-manager’ conundrum.
Ha—we can agree on that!
No, one of the Houston figures (a Republican judge) said that HE never agreed to that policy (it was in place before he came to the office) and would not abide by it.
Borrow against the money and use it as a revenue stream, and Rick Perry almost sold it off to a Spanish concern for the quick buck.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.