Ben Wear discusses (but unfortunately does not link to) a report from a task force created by the Texas legislature to examine TxDot's public-private toll road partnerships. These partnerships have stoked a lot of opposition. The task force offered a mixed evaluation; it is unlikely to settle the debate.
I think privatizing toll roads is a bad idea, at least for now and maybe forever.
Privatizing roads is unpopular. Some people simply can't abide turning public roads over to private companies. Some think the deals amount to corporate charity. And public-private agreements include contract provisions that infuriate some people. These include clauses limiting speed limits or capacity increases on parallel roads. These are necessary to assure the private operator that revenue will be stable, which in turn is necessary to sell bonds. But most people don't see them that way.
There is already plenty of resistance to tolling roads. It will take the public time to get accustomed to them. There is no need to link tolls and privatization, which simply stokes more opposition to tolls.
There is another reason to oppose privatization. Privatization requires that each new road pay for itself. For reasons I've explained before, the roads that ought to be tolled are the congested, older roads. Properly pricing these older roads with congestion tolls would generate revenue to fund new capacity -- whether new roads or commuter or light rail. Pricing new roads does little to relieve the congestion on existing roads. Instead, it discourages trips that ought to be taken while doing nothing to discourage trips that shouldn't be taken. (This is exacerbated by TxDot's insistence on charging flat tolls rather than variable congestion tolls.) It should be no surprise, then, that new toll roads rarely pay for themselves.
We ought to treat our roads and transit systems as a network. We should care about network capacity and network congestion and not so much about the revenue generated by a given road. Privatization encourages us to chop up the network into little pieces. That's counter-productive at best.
