u235

I pay a tax on my car that goes to the town each year. This tax is to help maintain the roads and streets that I drive on. In the past America has built bridges, tunnels, highways with American labor and American money. To my knowledge that's what tolls and taxes are for, to keep the way safe and open for people to get from place to place.

I do know that the purpose of tolls have changed. In many cases tolls continue to exist to provide income to the state for other transportation related expenses or sometimes other needs like education. Long after the road or bridge has been paid for - the toll remains. Frankly I'm ok with that. That is as long as that money is going, in some way, to the people that live there. Naturally I wouldn't be writing this if it were always the case.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying.

On a single day in June, an Australian-Spanish partnership paid $3.8 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. An Australian company bought a 99-year lease on Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway, and Texas officials decided to let a Spanish-American partnership build and run a toll road from Austin to Seguin for 50 years.

Few people know that the tolls from the U.S. side of the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, go to a subsidiary of an Australian company -- which also owns a bridge in Alabama.

What's even less amusing is that this effort is being lauded by conservatives as a way of "de-politicizing" the inflation of tolls. In essence when your bridge fare goes up 50% a year, you won't be able to blame your state.... because you see it's not in their hands. It's a nifty way to shift the blame, and responsibility of what, to me, is a key state asset. Yes, supposedly there are legal loopholes to enable the state to grab control in times of emergency, but how that's defined or implemented seems as vague as the reporting of this infrastructure being sold abroad in the first place.

I always laughed at people who took out second mortgages to buy vacation homes. Essentially I felt that anyone mortgaging property they owned (or are paying to own) should not sell it a second time to buy themselves more debt. I find it scary as hell that American cities and states think it's ok to "cash in" on American land, public land in my mind, buy selling roads and bridges to foreign nations. And I don't see how privatization really eliminates the graft, mismanagement, and inherent responsibility that the states and federal government face in dealing with transportation. To me all it does is move those problems (and responsibility) farther away from the people who are most affected by it.

Now when something goes wrong or needs to be fixed there will be a layer of international resistance on top of local/state and federal to prevent the person driving on the road from interacting with the people responsible for it.

So, who do your roads belong to? Do you know?