pork

Lawrence (aka Larry, Butch) Brown AASHTO prez/Mississippi DOT chief is saying frustration, not booze, led to his dissing of LaHood - that produced an extraordinary reprimand from federal Highway administrator Victor Mendez in New Orleans recently.  see: http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/4967

Oklahoma Turnpike Authority would be required by law to exempt "emergency vehicles" from tolls under a bill proceeding through the Oklahoma House of Representatives. The bill HR2533 also bars tolls on police even when not on duty.

For more than a decade the Turnpike Authority has been a regular dispenser of political pork in Massachusetts. Each year since 1996 for example under the guise of tourist promotion it has provided scores of handouts to groups around the state. By Washington DC pork standards the Boston pork has been pretty trivial - tens of thousands from Beacon Hill compared to multi-millions from Capitol Hill.

The Turnpike Authority's tourism grant program is required by law to be:

West Virginia pols must be among the country's most shameless favor traders to do business in any state Capitol. Loud in their denunciations of the state's Turnpike authority for the condition of the Turnpike, and louder against any move to raise tolls - they've remained the same in depreciating dollars since 1981 - they nevertheless continue to find inventive new off-road uses for the Turnpike's revenues.

For years the Massachusetts Turnpike has acquiesced in being used by legislators to distribute largess - maybe smalless - to communities along its length. A law going back to the 1990s requires the Turnpike to spend $750k/year "for the benefit of cities and towns located within the turnpike corridor."

$500k must be spent on the Turnpike west of MA128/I-95 and $250k east of it in the Boston suburbs. The AP reports that the money has gone for pedestrian walks, websites, tourist promotion, visitor bureaus, performing arts, and tourist branding campaigns.

The Center for Instrumented Critical Infrastructure (CICI) sounds like an outfit that would promote sensors built into roads and bridges and might be of interest to tollroads. Tollroads are leaders in road instrumentation - with electromagnetic and fiberoptic loops in the pavement, light curtains in toll lanes, laser and optical profilers overhead, radar detection and tracking of vehicles, weigh in motion gear, pavement modules to predict icing, weather stations, video surveillance, and more.

West Virginia Joe Manchin says he's committed to returning the state's parkway authority to what he calls "its core and original mission" of running the state Turnpike.

In the past year there has been mounting criticism of financial mess made by the authority's decade and a half long involvement in tourism and economic development - political euphemisms for putting money into marginal business projects most of which turn out to be lossmakers.