At a meeting this week of the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), reports Radio IQ, Director Justin Brown brought up what the radio station deemed a “troubling” point regarding the horrendous, worst-in-the-country traffic congestion on Interstate 95 between Northern Virginia and Richmond: the express lanes designed to alleviate traffic are run by a private operator — Australia-based Transurban.
“The way it’s structured, the state has to pay the operator if the state builds any projects that are proven to divert any traffic away from the I-95 express lanes,” Brown said. “We tried to quantify the monetary impact of that. But nobody had a great guess, and everyone said it would be really big.”
Yes, it’s true. As a condition of plowing billions of dollars of private equity into I-95 express lanes, to be funded with toll revenue, Transurban did, in fact, demand assurances that the Commonwealth would not undercut its investment by upgrading existing capacity and diverting traffic from its express lanes. If the state hadn’t offered the guarantee, there would be no express lanes — the state didn’t have the money to build them — and there would be no congestion relief.
If JLARC wants to quantify monetary impacts, don’t stop at examining Transurban’s decades-long express-lane monopoly. Calculate how many more person-hours of delay there would be if Transurban hadn’t built the express lane. Then render judgment.