Virginia's largest share of the highway bill is for a truck route, truckers don't want.
Virginia ranks 12th in the amount of highway money from the bill -- $563 million.
The biggest earmark is $141 million to expand Interstate 81 -- putting in special truck lanes.
A private consortium -- Star Solutions -- wants the special lanes. They see it as a road to development. But Virginia's own Department of Transportation conducted studies that say the truck lane option is the worst plan of all for developing the road.
And truckers aren't happy it'll be a toll road. They claim it'll force trucks off I-81 creating new problems on secondary roads while the truck lanes go unused:
Virginia ranks 12th in the amount of highway money from the bill -- $563 million.
The biggest earmark is $141 million to expand Interstate 81 -- putting in special truck lanes.A private consortium -- Star Solutions -- wants the special lanes. They see it as a road to development. But Virginia's own Department of Transportation conducted studies that say the truck lane option is the worst plan of all for developing the road.
And truckers aren't happy it'll be a toll road. They claim it'll force trucks off I-81 creating new problems on secondary roads while the truck lanes go unused:
"Findings show that a half of all trucks would take parallel roads to skip the proposed I-81 tolls, and that is dangerous because those roads are not built for that kind of traffic." -- Darrin Roth, American Trucking Association , quoted at etrucker.com
It's not over yet. The $151 million is just a start. The total cost of the project will be $13.6 billion. So expect the private consortium and their lobbyists to be back at the federal trough for more money. (WUSA)
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Today, the Unbossed.com team released "Roads Scholar", the first report in a week-long investigative series on toll roads and how government privatization is screwing the public.
Connect the D.O.T.s on a project in Colorado that was a blatant land grab for
private developers at public expense. Later this week, we'll demonstrate how to investigate these projects in your own home town and how to pitch this untold story to your local media.
So before you resign yourself to pitching quarters into the toll basket, check out what your local government may be doing behind the publics' backs.
You can read the whole series at >> http://www.unbossed.com
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