Ask not for whom the road tolls, it tolls for thee

Laila Yuile writes about the shadow toll on the Sea-to-Sky Highway.
What's a shadow toll?
It's the one no one told you about, the one you can't see.
But it can see you.

There's an interesting story about Macquarie, the Australian investment bank group which among things acts as transportation project managers and road toll operators all over the world, including the Sea-to-Sky Highway in BC and the Highway 407 Express Toll Route in Ontario, the first privatized toll road in Canada.


A few years ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry was pushing to build the Trans-Texas Corridor, a quarter-mile-wide swath of truck-only toll lanes, railway lines and multiple traffic lanes rolling from Mexico to the Oklahoma state border. The prime bidder was Cintra SA, Macquarie's partner in the 99 year lease on the 407.

To a lot of us at the time the Trans-Texas Corridor looked like the start of the Nafta Superhighway Trade Corridor.
To many Texas ranchers and farmers it looked like a royal pain in the ass and opponents of privatizing roads came out against it in the thousands. All up and down the proposed route, ads and editorials critical of the proposal ran in the local newspapers.
Macquarie bought them out. All 42 of them. For $80-million.
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