Free Republic

As the controversy escalates regarding the Trans-Texas Corridor, I find alarming an Express-News article dated March 12, 2005. It is titled "State gets in fast lane to new toll road system" and subtitled "Go-ahead given for planning Trans-Texas Corridor segment." It is the announcement of the signing of the first contract for this project, and it extols the "cutting-edge, bold and forward-looking" aspects of Rick Perry's plan. Yet today, amid the discussions about farmland, foreign involvement and NAFTA, I hear little about the subject of one small paragraph near the end of this article. The paragraph reads, "Traffic levels on...

A company selected to build a toll road from Dallas-Fort Worth to San Antonio has a reputation for aggressively collecting money from motorists, treating customers poorly and frequently raising tolls without public input. Those are among the complaints lodged against Cintra -- selected in December to build the first leg of the Trans-Texas Corridor -- by motorists on the company's toll roads in Toronto and Chicago. Across North America, private companies such as Cintra are spending billions of dollars to build roads in exchange for the right to collect tolls for 50 to 100 years -- relieving taxpayers of the...