Building roads is an adventure and it can make for great stories. Take Orlando's Southern Connector now better known as FL-417 or the southern portion of the Central Florida Greeneway. Located on the southern fringe of the developed area it was a dicey finance back in the late 1980s when it was planned... MORE
Building roads is an adventure and it can make for great stories. Take Orlando's Southern Connector now better known as FL-417 or the southern portion of the Central Florida Greeneway. Located on the southern fringe of the developed area it was a dicey finance back in the late 1980s when it was planned. The projected traffic and revenue might service the bonds to build the 35km (22mi) east-west link, but it looked doubtful. It was the third east-west tollroad and the most remote. The county refused to pledge gas tax revenues if the project underperformed.
About half way along its planned length was the heavily traveled Florida Turnpike Mainline, but a 417/FloridaTpk interchange would cost $37m.
In mid-1989 the Southern Connector project got a break. The Florida DOT announced it would build the interchange with $37m of taxpayer money. With the prospect of extra traffic being fed from the Turnpike both directions onto the Connector, and no more debt needed, the underwriters relented. $385m of bonds were successfully sold and the Connector got under way.
Design work was done on the interchange and some land acquired for ramps, OOCEA acting as FDOT's agent. Then the state changed its mind about the interchange. Other priorities. To this day it has not been built, and motorists have no way of getting between the Turnpike and the 417 tollroad.
So much for reassuring bond underwriters!
Jerrell Shofner history prof emeritus from University of Central Florida has put together a useful and interesting history of the OOCEA tollroads in Florida ("Building a community: the history of the Orlando-Orange County Expressway Authority." OOCEA 2001.) Every tollster should have something like this, so its employees and interested locals can get the story of what it took to build the facilities they enjoy, and give them some sense of being part of an important ongoing enterprise.
History is made by determined and talented people. The history of Orlando's excellent road system goes back to a bunch of businessmen who saw the place would prosper if major highways were routed through the area. Martin Andersen, newspaper owner and Billy Dial, a banker worked assiduously to get Florida's Turnpike and I-4 to intersect there, and made sure an airport could be developed out of a surplus airforce base. When NASA established its huge space launch center at Cape Canaveral these Orlando businessmen moved quickly to link it to Orlando. The impetus came from looking at Jacksonville's (now disbanded) tollroads. The OOCEA's first project was the Bee Line Expressway (FL-528) to ensure that the space center's connections were west to Orlando. Without the Beeline Exy NASA's primary connections could have south to Melbourne or north to Daytona. Instead Orlando became the staging point and added an excellent connection to the Atlantic coast to its existing connections to Tampa and to the north via I-4 and to Miami via the Turnpike. The initial 28km (17.4mi) of the Beeline's 2x2-lanes cost $5m in 1966-67. It was named the Martin Andersen Bee Line Exy after the newspaperman advocate of the toll system.
$7m of revenue bonds financed the Bee Line based on a Coverdale and Colpits study forecasting 3,000 vehicles a day paying a 35c toll.
The second major OOCEA tollroad FL-408 or East-West Expressway was intra-urban - designed to provide freeflow movement east-west across the city and to be a reliever for FL-50 or Colonial Drive the major signalized arterial. The argument for it was that I-4 and the Turnpike provided a degree of north-south movement but there was a lack of E-W service. It was launched in the mid-1960s at the time when Disney announced its biggest building program to the southwest, NASA and the navy were expanding, and a new university was being launched. Norm Wuesterfeld of WSA was put in charge of T&R studies and HNTB engineering. Finding an acceptable route was difficult. 1,100 houses, 80 businesses, 6 churches and 65 other properties had to be acquired. The road was routed through the middle of a lake. And there were major political upheavals.
$71m of bonds for the 20km (13mi) 408 were sold in 1971.During construction in 1973 there was a huge fight over the board, and the state demanded the resignation of the chairman, threatening to withhold all state support until they got it. Shofner gives a blow by blow description of the showdown but doesn't really explain what lay behind it.
The pike opened at the end of 1973. Traffic was light at first, but by 1978 was 78k tolls/day and profitable. The major local newspaper however had turned hostile and repeatedly demanded abolition of the OOCEA. However the authority's growing financial strength, and the need for new road sustained it. In the early 1980s FL-528, the original Bee Line was extended at both ends and an interchange was built to serve the expanding airport.
A project first known as the Eastern Beltline later to become FL-417 Central Florida Greeneway (not a play for enviro support but a tribute to chairman Jim Greene) was long in getting to construction too. It was a fringe area road traversing the south and the east sides of the metro area. First WSA projections showed tolls wouldn't support it, but over two decades it was built by stages and is the longest road in the system
In the late 1980s OOCEA attempted construction of a Central Connector or Airport Expressway, an 8km (5mi) link between the Beeline and downtown Orlando would have provided a fast airport-CBD trip. That $100m project would have attracted plenty of traffic and helped the downtown but it ran into fierce resistance in a 1,000-pop city called Edgewood just south of Orlando. Though $20m had been spent on land purchases and design work, Edgewood used a clause in the OOCEA statute requiring the agreement of local jurisdictions for right of way purchases to defeat the road in the courts in 1991.
The authority was a shoe-string operation for many of these years with only a couple of staff. Until the East-West was built it had no premises of its own, and the staff worked out of the offices of the chairman's business! OOCEA in effect was its board of directors plus a secretary to keep minutes, and hired consultants. The state Turnpike did OOCEA's toll collection and other operations in its first 25 years. It was seen for many years as solely a financing entity and a construction manager. As late as the 1980s the local newspaper suggested the OOCEA be disbanded after the next road opened. There seemed to be no notion of its responsibility to operate and manage the road system after building it.
Only when OOCEA took over operations and implemented an electronic toll system - and importantly hired PR professionals - did it start to gain respect as a permanent local institution.
This book is a vivid reminder that roadbuilding is a highly political activity. Little is left to engineering judgment or city planning or what makes most financial sense. Everything is infused with interest group struggle. How the roads get built depends mostly on the skill and persistence of their advocates relative to the opposition.
SHORTCOMINGS: The book is very useful, but it could be better. Shofner several times hints at a great story, but then doesn't tell it. He arouses the reader's curiosity, then leaves you in suspense. For example, a better storyteller would delve a bit into why the state DOT welshed on its promise to build the 417/Turnpike IC. Was it a serious promise, or a setup to get 417 over the financial hump? And on the big 1973 fight at the OOCEA board with the dramatic state intervention, the reader needs not just a description of the public moves but some analysis. What was it all about? Was it mainly personalities, or issues, or patronage powers, or what?
Finally, Shofner has a fondness for archaic usages or pomposities which irritate. Suppliers don't supply; in Shofner's telling they always "furnish." The OOCEA was "empowered" not only to build expressways, he tells us but also "all necessary appurtenances" such as ramps, and bridges as well. Really! And we don't need to be told that the legislature gave the toll authority the power to levy tolls... TRnews 2003-09-09
