Rendell's Road

From Pennsylvania comes the news that the Keystone State's governor, Edward Rendell, is moving ahead with plans to privatize, in effect, the Pennsylvania Turnpike by offering for bid a contract to run the road for 75 years. The winning bidder, a combination of Citigroup and a Spanish company, Abertis Infraestructuras SA, offered $12.8 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Now, the notion of privately built, owned, and operated infrastructure — trains, bridges, roads, tunnels — has long been a preoccupation of ours. When we raise it with working politicians, though, we are often looked at as if we had spent too much time reading Reason magazine. When we asked Mayor Bloomberg about it in respect of the Second Avenue Subway, he demanded to know what we'd been smoking.

Yet here the governor of one of America's largest states, not some libertarian think-tank denizen but a Democrat, no less, is moving ahead with such a plan. And he's not alone. The Journal reports that "The city of Chicago raised $1.83 billion in 2005 by leasing its Chicago Skyway for 99 years. Indiana, in turn, obtained $3.85 billion in 2006 through the 75-year lease of the Indiana Toll Road."

What does this mean for New York? It's an option for Governor Paterson to look at as he seeks to close the state's budget gap and to show that he's not strictly a conventional left-wing Albany politician. If the Pennsylvania Turnpike can be privatized, why not the New York State Thruway?

As for Mayor Bloomberg, he met Friday with Rep. John Mica, the congressman of Florida whose plan for a two-hour bullet train from New York to Washington we broke on our front page last week. "Congressman Mica's plan, which is included in the House Amtrak reauthorization bill, would solicit proposals — including proposals from the private sector — to build the high speed rail service," the mayor said in expressing strong support for the project.

Quoth the mayor: "No idea should be ignored or dismissed simply because it is ambitious. That is not how America's greatest infrastructure marvels — from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Grand Coulee Dam — got built." We're glad he mentioned the Brooklyn Bridge, which has been defaced by rust and graffiti on the watch of his transportation department.

As it happens, the Brooklyn Bridge was built, in the first place, by a private company — albeit one in which the cities of Brooklyn and New York were investors. It intended to charge a toll and make a profit. In building and maintaining the next generation of the city's roads, bridges, trains and tunnels, private enterprise can play a role that is constructive in more ways than one.