Free Republic

New analysis of projected provincial gas tax revenues in Ontario has revealed that that source of provincial funding will fall much more dramatically than predicted just five years ago due to increased use of electric vehicles and other factors. And so, concludes Trent University professor emeritus Harry Kitchen in a new report titled Ontario’s Downward Trend for Fuel Revenue: Will Road Pricing Fill the Gap?, the provincial government must look for other sources of revenues to build transportation infrastructure. Kitchen recommends road pricing, such as tolls and HOT lanes, with funds raised earmarked for future transportation improvements, and dynamic parking...

Leaders within the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation have approved a public-private partnership to reconstruct a portion of Interstate 81. PennDOT’s P3 Board approved the project, which will involve the reconstruction of a 4.5-mile section of the route near Wilkes-Barre, on Dec. 4. Wilkes-Barre, the seat of Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania, is 20 miles southwest of Scranton. The project will involve widening a portion of I-81 to three lanes in both directions, realigning 2.5 miles of southbound interstate and replacing eight bridges. Other safety measures include eliminating a left-hand exit and improving a substandard weave distance between two routes that...

Moving federal agencies to the heartland would get struggling states hooked on big government

The first-ever highway partially made of reclaimed plastic was inaugurated in Mexico on Nov. 13. The 2.5-mile stretch of highway in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico used 1.7 tons of recycled plastic, or the equivalent of 425,000 plastic packaging units, according to Dow Plastics Technology Mexico. "The advantage of using recycled plastic products is that they can be used on all types of highways, not only in high-performance products, which can extend the life span of any paved road," Paula Sans, Dow Mexico's director of packaging and specialty plastics, said in a release. The newly paved stretch of...

The Twin Ports Interchange reconstruction project through Lincoln Park soared $100 million over budget this month, forcing planners to defer indefinitely portions of the work scheduled for 2020-23. The $343 million project is scheduled to begin in May. Minnesota Department of Transportation figures released Monday at a regular public meeting about the project showed a $443 million price tag. "This is what happens with every big project," Duane Hill, district engineer based in Duluth, said Monday. "You have to manage it as you go along. We thought we did a good job initially coming up with a budget for this...

A study of the public-private partnership project delivery method has some cautionary advice for governments and contractors considering them. Entitled "Highway Robbery: Public Private Partnerships and Nova Scotia Highways" by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the study urges jurisdictions to stop using the model to build highways. The report concludes that governments should instead employ traditional public procurement, based on its findings that contracting out services through a P3 is more expensive than public procurement, has the potential to compromise highway safety, needlessly duplicates government services and lacks mechanisms for public accountability. “Public infrastructure and services should remain fully...

Jerusalem residents and environmental groups see a threatened ecological "disaster" in the plans for a series of major infrastructure projects to expand roads and build intersections west of the city, being promoted by the Jerusalem Municipality and the Transportation Ministry. The eight proposed projects, mostly for areas just outside the city, involve construction of a large park-and-ride lot with 1,000 spots at Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Karem and highways connecting the suburb of Mevasseret Zion, the Castel National Park area and the outlying neighborhood of Ein Karem. The largest plan, recently presented for members of the public to submit...

A man who was stabbed to death aboard a San Francisco Bay Area commuter train Tuesday may have been trying to stop the theft of another rider’s shoes, authorities said.

Presidential candidate Joe Biden has released an infrastructure plan that calls for $1.3 trillion in investment over 10 years. The plan, released Nov. 14, makes a pledge to update the nation’s freight infrastructure, from highways and canals to railroads and tunnels. Biden plans to spend $50 billion over the first year of his presidency to repair roads, highways and bridges. He proposes a new $40 billion, 10-year Transformational Projects Fund, which will provide substantial grants for projects that are too large to be funded through existing programs, such as a major port upgrade or new tunnel. Biden also plans to...

In the latest step toward the rebirth of San Francisco’s Presidio from an aging former Army base to a bright light of America’s national park system, crews are set to break ground Thursday on a project to build a new 14-acre public park on top of two freeway tunnels near the Golden Gate Bridge. When finished in 2021, the unusual project, called Tunnel Tops, will link Crissy Field, on San Francisco’s waterfront, to the Presidio’s Main Post, parade grounds and visitor’s center. That connection was severed more than 80 years ago when the road to and from the Golden Gate...

With few exceptions, states are losing the battle with aging bridges in need of repair or replacement. Even states with low percentages of bridges rated poor are finding it difficult to keep up with bridge and road systems that in many cases are 50 years old or older. Utah, which ranks fourth for the lowest percentage of poor bridges, programs a bridge for repair or replacement in the year after it drops to a poor rating, completing the project within four or five years. The Utah Department of Transportation notes, though, that the number of bridges falling from good to...

Orange County has received a $20 million federal grant to expand its autonomous shuttle system at Lake Nona, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao said Tuesday, part of a combined $62 million in transportation awards to three Florida cities. Chao was at Lake Nona, a southeast Orlando neighborhood, along with Gov. Ron DeSantis and state transportation secretary Kevin Thibault to reveal a combined $883 million in Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) grants nationwide. Orange County was among just a handful out of more than 600 applications across the U.S. to get funding. The grant to the Orange’s Local...

Maryland and Virginia will partner to rebuild and widen the American Legion Bridge in a ­billion-dollar project to relieve congestion at the Washington region’s worst traffic bottleneck, the states’ governors announced Tuesday. In an unusual example of interstate cooperation, Virginia has agreed to help pay for the project even though most of the bridge — like the Potomac River flowing beneath it — belongs to Maryland. The plan marks a breakthrough in a years-long impasse over widening the bridge on the northwestern stretch of the Capital Beltway. In the past, Maryland has said it didn’t have enough money for the...

The last time the National Transportation Safety Board came down hard on engineering and construction was in 2007. That year, the board delivered reports on the collapse of the I-35 Highway Bridge in Minneapolis that killed 13 people, and on a ceiling collapse in a Boston Central Artery tunnel that killed one motorist. Both involved completed structures. With its final investigation findings, the board also made recommendations for new standards and procedures and quality control. NTSB's report on last year’s Miami bridge collapse at Florida International University in mid-construction, which killed five motorists and one construction worker, has similar recommendations....

As he travels the state with top administrators from the Maryland Department of Transportation, Secretary Pete K. Rahn hears a frequent plea from business leaders, environmentalists and the public — expand bus and rail options, so travelers don’t have to be so dependent on their cars. Rahn has a ready response for transit advocates: Under Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. (R), Maryland is spending more on transit than at any other time. “We’re at 42 percent of the state [transportation] trust fund going to transit already, with 3 percent of the revenues coming from transit,” Rahn told a reporter in...

A bridge-building disaster should be incomprehensible in today’s technical world. Humans have been building bridges for centuries. The science should be well sorted out by now — and for the most part, it is. But the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the March 2018 collapse of the FIU pedestrian bridge highlighted basic design flaws and a complete lack of oversight by every single party that had responsibility to either identify the design errors or stop work once it was clear that there was a massive internal failure. We all know “what happened” here. But the “why” is more elusive....

For more than 25 years, the Federal government has let the Highway Trust Fund, the source of money for Federal infrastructure projects, lose it's purchasing power. That's because the gas tax has been stuck at 18.4 cents per gallon for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel fuel since 1993. While construction costs have increased 125% since 2003, funding has not. Instead of waiting for Washington to get it together, states have taken it upon themselves to fund their own infrastructure projects. Since 2013, 31 states and the District of Columbia have enacted legislation that will increase or may increase overall...

LECANTO — When Florida lawmakers signed off this year on a bill creating more than 300 miles of toll roads, they did so with scant evidence the project was needed. More than five months later, after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law and the project has been vetted in two rounds of public hearings, local officials are growing frustrated by the persistent lack of details about what would be the largest expansion of Florida’s toll system in decades. “We’re beating a dead horse right now before it’s even born,” said Dixie County Commissioner Mark Hatch, who sits on a...

I-4 Ultimate’s promise five years ago was that private financing and management would make Florida’s largest road reconstruction project better, faster and cheaper. Today, the 21-mile and $2.3 billion rebuilding of Interstate 4 through metro Orlando is slogging through rising costs to an uncertain finish date, with crews working day and night under the pall of repeated worker fatalities. Some of the issues: - The fifth death of a construction worker last month that preliminary findings say would have been avoidable with a more cautious approach to bridge building that SGL Constructors made mandatory this month. - Construction consortium I-4...

California is staying true to its reputation as the land of innovation — it is making blackouts, heretofore the signature of impoverished and war-torn lands, a routine feature of 21st-century American life. More than 2 million people are going without power in Northern and Central California, in the latest and biggest of the intentional blackouts that are, astonishingly, California’s best answer to the risk of runaway wildfires. Power — and all the goods it makes possible — is synonymous with modern civilization. It shouldn’t be a negotiable for anyone living in a well-functioning society, or even in California, which, despite...