The Blade is justifiably impatient with the excuse-making at the Turnpike Board:

A foolish pass on E-ZPass

Millions of American motorists already know and appreciate the convenience of electronic toll collection on their turnpikes and toll roads - until, that is, they see those “Welcome to Ohio” signs as they enter the Buckeye State on the Ohio Turnpike.

The day is not far off when a motorist will be able to travel on toll roads from the East Coast to Illinois and never have to stop at a toll plaza - except here in Ohio.

….. Eleven states - Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Illinois - are now part of the E-ZPass network.

Illinois hooked up last year, installing its “I-Pass” system at nine toll plazas along the Illinois Tollway, and will outfit the remaining plazas this year. Indiana, which just last week privatized its toll road, says the new operators consider E-ZPass a top priority.

So where does this leave Ohioans? Further isolated from more progressive states, something the Ohio Turnpike has no intention of doing anything about.

….. because it has become the standard, E-ZPass states are able to offer reciprocity to motorists who have signed up for E-ZPass somewhere else.

Last September, passenger-car customers of the Illinois Tollway’s I-PASS program began using their transponders to pay tolls in states that accept E-ZPass, and E-ZPass customers from other states were able to pay tolls electronically in Illinois.

Like Illinois, other states which have retained their own names for their system - Smart Tag in Virginia, Fast Lane in Massachusetts - employ the same E-ZPass technology and usually display the E-ZPass logo alongside their own.

All of this makes Ohio Turnpike Executive Director Gary Suhadolnik’s defense of Ohio’s reluctance to enter the E-ZPass age disingenuous. The turnpike, he says, is not a true commuter toll road with big-city congestion like Chicago and is considered basically a pass-through highway for long-distance travelers. Besides, he adds, the turnpike commission doesn’t have the money to install transponder reading equipment at all of its toll plazas.

Well, the money can be found.

Stop, there. A crusty bureaucracy kicking and screaming that it doesn’t want to join the 21st century. Not unlike those city clerks in Philadelphia in the early 1990s who had to be negotiated with before they would accept word processors instead of typewriters.

Here’s an idea to get rid of the problem once and for all: Privatize The Turnpike.

Something like it has been done:

Cintra-Macquarie to take over Chicago Skyway for $1.8b
Oct. 15, 2004

The City of Chicago has chosen the Cintra-Macquarie bid for its Skyway tollroad. Mayor Richard M. Daley announced this today, saying the investors will pay the city $1,820 million for the right to toll the elevated pike for 99 years. Daley called it “a great result for the taxpayers of the City of Chicago.”

The bid is considerably more than City officials expected. They never talked officially about what they thought it would bring but the figure of $700m to $800m was mentioned as the minimum they would accept. By all accounts they would have been happy to get $1200m. Cintra-Macquarie were the high bidder, because after a process of eliminating groups deemed not to have the financial strength or experience the contest became solely a matter of the cash offered. The 99 year term is similar to the term of 407ETR concession in Ontario - a long term but one which generates a higher price than the more typical 30 to 40 year concession terms for tolling.

The mayor said the transaction is the first privatization of an existing toll road or toll bridge in the United States, and “the City expects other agencies that own such assets to follow its lead.”

Daley claimed the transaction was a testimony to improved management of city assets: “Through good management, a road that lost money for many years has been turned into a valuable asset for the City. However, running a toll road is not a core function of City government. And the City faces financial challenges this year and for the next several years.”

Daley said the funds will be used to pay off existing Skyway debt and other City debt, create a long-term reserve fund and strengthen the City’s financial condition. He has instructed his financial people to consult with financial rating agencies and make recommendations for “responsible and prudent use of the funds.”

The Skyway is a bit less than 8 miles long. The Ohio Turnpike stretches 240 miles. The Skyway’s toll is currently $2.50 and will, according to the agreement with the Chicago, double in the next nine years. The Turnpike cross-state auto toll is currently $8.95.

How much could the state get for The Turnpike? Geoffrey Seagal at The Reason Foundation looked at what gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell is considering, which is something less than an outright sale, and estimated a pretty big number:

Secretary Blackwell wants to better realize the full potential and value of an underutilized state asset—the Ohio Turnpike. A public-private partnership would allow the state to lease the turnpike to a private company using what is called a “concession agreement.” Experience in other states, and around the world, suggests that an agreement could generate between $4 and $6 billion in new revenues for Ohio. Even after the state pays off existing debt on the turnpike, it would still have at least $3.3 billion to invest in new projects.

I say, “Go for it.” For one thing, I doubt the private firm will resist EZ-Pass.

The College Board messed up in scoring the SAT test of about 4,000 high school students by giving them lower scores than they should have received (HT Don Luskin):

The board, the New York-based nonprofit that owns the high-stakes test, said the problem affected less than 1% of the roughly half million students who took the exam that month. The disclosure came just as many schools are making final decisions about which applicants to accept — and as anxious students wait for word.

For individual students, the scoring discrepancies ranged from 10 to about 200 points on the 2,400-point exam, with most of the errors from 10 to 40 points, said Chiara Coletti, a board spokeswoman.

But as an e-mailer to Luskin notes, that’s only half the story:

A very small number of students, not included in the 4,000, received incorrect scores that were too high, she said. Those scores will not be changed.

WHAT? Some “small number” (betcha it’s also about 4,000) of kids are going to get an unfair advantage and get into schools to which other kids should have gained admission. And that doesn’t bother anyone? Just because we don’t know their names (and apparently no one is putting pressure on The College Board to tell us), doesn’t mean that it’s not happening.

The College Board owes the public a lot more information than we’re currently getting, and, strangely, no one seems at all curious about it. Maybe we need a catchy slogan: The College Board lied, thousands cried.

Pepperdine Professor Emeritus of Economics George Reisman makes a huge point about the positions of the global warming and climate change cabal (HT Don Luskin):

The environmental movement maintains that science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant, to produce a pesticide that is safe, or even to bake a loaf of bread that is safe, if that loaf of bread contains chemical preservatives. When it comes to global warming, however, it turns out that there is one area in which the environmental movement displays the most breathtaking confidence in the reliability of science and technology, an area in which, until recently, no one—not even the staunchest supporters of science and technology—had ever thought to assert very much confidence at all. The one thing, the environmental movement holds, that science and technology can do so well that we are entitled to have unlimited confidence in them is forecast the weather—for the next one hundred years!

Everything mentioned in the first sentence above is subject to painstakingly detailed quality control and testing and government oversight. Research on climate change, an iffy project in the first place, as Reisman notes, also has the handicap of a woefully inadequate peer review process. Recently, we have seen in another area of scientific research favored by the liberal elite, embryonic stem cell research, that the entire research effort could be faked and not get caught until much later (the Korean scientist involved finally had his license revoked). Faked climate change research would be more difficult to detect in the current peer-review system.

And yet we’re supposed to be believe that global warming, and of course the need to radically alter the world’s economy, is irrefutable gospel. Puh-leeze.

Larry Kudlow tells us in his Townhall column today why the stock market is (finally) showing some movement:

There’s good reason why the NYSE (about 2,500 stocks), the Transportation Index, and the small-cap Russell 2000 are at their all-time peaks. New inflation reports show diminished price pressures, lower tax rates have boosted business, the Fed is nearly done tightening, job-creating profits are surging, consumers are spending, and former rust-belt manufacturing industries are enjoying their best run in twenty years as they participate in the growing global economy.

….. Importantly, today’s strong stock market is also betting that investor tax-cut extensions for capital gains and dividends, the backbone of this recovery, will make it through Congress. “Paygo” legislation, which would force tax hikes to offset investor tax cuts, has been defeated. (I hold that a new Gramm-Rudman-like spending-limit approach would be much more fruitful.)

Kudlow, and the market, had better be right about the so-called tax cut extensions, or you can kiss any further market rallies good-bye (I call them so-called tax-cut extensions because in reality failing to extend would be a tax increase).

He also gives the market credit for prescience on national defense, which I believe is going a bit far.

But he’s worried about the conduct of Congress, and justifiably so:

However, the big “if” in this optimistic stock market scenario is the GOP Congress. If Republicans cannot downsize the budget, tax cuts will be in jeopardy while tax hikes may even become a threat. In the early skirmishing, the GOP Congress is flunking the budget-cutting test.

Last week, the Republican-led Senate stiff-armed President Bush’s call for belt-tightening when it adopted a $2.8 trillion fiscal 2007 budget resolution — an entitlement-filled package that is more than $16 billion higher than the president’s request. The Senate snubbed even modest attempts to slow mandatory spending programs, which Bush had targeted for $65 billion in net savings over five years. Almost all of the proposed amendments sought to increase spending.

….. GOP budget obesity is a huge problem. And it’s not just a tax threat. Politically, a big-spending GOP will demoralize its increasingly frustrated small-government conservative base. These are the folks who can carry the election in November. Without them the GOP Congress will be sunk.

Bingo.

Man’s best friend indeed (HT Good News Blog):

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