Briefs

An advisory panel voted 8 to 3 Friday in favor of Virginia proceeding to negotiate with Fluor Corp to add four toll lanes to the Washington Beltway (I-495) in northern Virginia. Fluor is proposing to invest about $700m on the 21km (13mi) project in return for toll rights. The vote came at the end of a three-hour meeting with some of those voting both for and against complaining that some of their questions haven't been answered. (Ah for perfect foresight!)

Kemper Freedman road advocate in Seattle WA: "In King County, a very large county covering Seattle, 61% of our transport money is spent on transit, and the reward we have for that is 3% of trips. So in public dollars we spend 20 times as much per trip for transit as we do when we build roads. The amount we spend on transit just keeps going up, the amount that's left we spend on roads keeps going down, and yet we are still 97% dependent on the automobile for mobility.

A terrified young deer made it across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco at the height of the morning commute.

Joseph Waggonner, deputy head of the Maryland Transportation Authority (MdTA) is quoted in the GAZETTE newspaper (2004-05-14) as saying his agency has the power to bring investors in to build tollroads in the state. MdTA can and will solicit proposals. The state's "public-private partnership" program enacted a couple of years ago provides for solicited and unsolicited proposals for ports, airports and rail projects, but specifically excludes roads.

Milwaukee has a warm spot in our memory. It stands for plentiful beer. When we arrived in the US in the summer a quarter century ago one of the joys of our new country was cheap beer. Where we came from beer was about $20/24cans. But the first time we visited a supermarket in Tarrytown NY we discovered many beers at less than $10/24cans and the very cheapest, and quite passable was a Milwaukee beer at less than $5/24cans. We were sold.

The pox of punctuation marks is spreading. Look at the front page of the New York Times this morning

Divided Mission in Iraq Tempers Views of G.I.'s

For gawd's sake G.I.'s! The awful apostrophe once used to indicate an abbreviation or a possessive now precedes the plural suffix more and more.

Let's call them the New York Time's.

The Delaware River Port Authority which operates four toll bridges across to New Jersey from Philadelphia is reportedly giving lucrative toll collection work to the law firm of a NJ state senator Wayne R. Bryant. The Camden COURIER POST reports (2004-05-05) the firm Zeller & Bryant last year was paid $55k in legal fees by DRPA based on an hourly $225 billing to collect $19k in outstanding tolls and penalties. The $19k collected comes from only a few cases, DRPA says and but another 50 are ready to go, so the payments are an investment in future collections.