concession

Virginia DOT has announced an end to the botched procurement of a toll concession to fund improvements to I-81. Since October 2006 it has been clear that the project was going nowhere. Today VDOT used a letter from Kellogg Brown and Root, a lead company in the STAR Solutions consortium, as justification for issuing the official death notice.

Initially there seemed to be a lot going for the idea of tolling PA/I-80 but over-reaching by the Turnpike Commission now threatens its very existence. Key lawmakers in Pennsylvania are now moving to repeal Act 44 which underpins the Turnpike Commission's plans and are looking craft a compromise with the Rendell administration plan to get bids for a longterm lease/concession.

There's talk in the legislature in Harrisburg about denying 'foreign' companies the right to bid for a concession on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That would exclude most of the big bidders!

From what we hear the three big bids are likely to come from:

- Cintra and Macquarie

- Abertis, Deutsche Bank and Babcock & Brown

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is reporting a powerful line-up of figures supporting a private concession to build the uncompleted northern section of the Mon-Fayette Expressway between PA51 and I-376, locally known as the Parkway East.

Virginia DOT, Transurban and Fluor have signed the contracts and gone to financial close for the construction of four toll lanes plus direct connector ramps on 23km (14 miles) of the Capital Beltway (I-495) in northern Virginia between the Springfield interchange and just short of the Maryland line at the Potomac River.

Florida DOT has the America's largest private toll concession on the go with a request for qualifications (RFQ) for investor groups to finance, design, build, operate, maintain and toll a 74km (46 mile) $2.2b highway on the southwest edge of the Jacksonville area. The project involves a long river crossing, 14 interchanges and ten more overpasses. Called the First Coast Outer Beltway (FCOB) the project is a consolidation of two earlier projects:

With 211 out of 244 toll collectors voting the result was a vote of 108 to 103 in favor of going union Friday on the Indiana Toll Road (ITR). The ITR is run by a Cintra/Macquarie concession under a 75 year concession with the state of Indiana. This means that four different Teamsters Locals along the route now have the right to represent the 244 toll collectors in collective bargaining with the company.

There's a potential east-west tollroad of 80km (50 miles) between Palmdale and Victorville in the high desert country just over the mountains north of Los Angeles. A Request for Proposals (RFP) has been issued by the High Desert Corridor Joint Powers Authority, an agency of San Bernardino and Los Angeles Counties within whose jurisdiction the proposed corridor lies. The authority was formed about a year ago to develop the highway.

A TxDOT letter formally requesting detailed proposals asks Trans Texas Corridor 69 bidders to focus on upgrade to interstate expressway standard of US77 in the far south of corridor.

The South Bay Expressway (SBE) in the eastern part of the San Diego area opened Monday (Nov 19) after ceremonies the prior Friday. The tollroad 15km (9.3mi) long has had what is described in local reports as "light to moderate" traffic this week. Forecasts have been that average daily traffic will settle early in the range 30k to 40k.