Ghost Road

February 2007

By Todd Dills

In David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, which is set in the near future, the United States no longer officially exists.

The Organization of North American Nations, an entity controlled mostly by former U.S. big-business interests and including the former states of Canada and Mexico, has optioned out corporate naming rights to elements of human life as fundamental as time (instead of, say, A.D. 2025, the book begins in the “Year of Glad,” as in Glad the trash bag manufacturer). As broadcaster Lou Dobbs might have it, Wallace wasn’t writing a satire. He had the foresight of a prophet.

Dobbs has led numerous recent segments on his CNN show about what he calls moves by the administration of George W. Bush and counterparts in Canada and Mexico to lead the three countries clandestinely into a future “North American Union,” a superstate into which American sovereignty, Dobbs suggests, will be shoehorned and hence obliterated. As evidence, Dobbs often refers to the construction of something called the “NAFTA Superhighway.”

Owner-operator Maalik Ali, of Demopolis, Ala., says he’s heard it mentioned on XM radio and speculates that it’d be “a big hook-up, up north to Canada and across the country through Texas to Mexico.” He says Dobbs might be referring to I-69, which extends today from Port Huron, Mich., all the way to Indianapolis, Ind. Plans are in various stages from southern Indiana to Texas to extend that interstate all the way to Laredo. “That’ll be a gigantic highway,” Ali says, “when they get done with it.”

But he adds that he thinks the term also might work as a reference to I-5, which runs from the United States’ southern border outside San Diego through California, Oregon and Washington.

As he suggests, “NAFTA Superhighway” is more idea than road. But the history of the phrase’s use — from its genesis as a marketing term, its spread throughout American society as a catchall for shipping’s efficient future and finally its nadir as a symbol of the end of the country as we know it — neatly follows the increasing intensity of public/private partnership in highway planning and building in North America over the last two decades.

Back in 1991, with the passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), certain transportation corridors were designated “high-priority corridors” by the federal government. Part of the rationale behind the designation was anticipated congestion along the soon-to-be-complete interstate highway system. After NAFTA went into effect in 1994, allowing for the tariff-free flow of goods between the three North American nations, multistate (and, in many cases, multinational) advocacy groups, sensing opportunity, were founded around many of the corridors, aligning private interests and state governments for both lobbying and research purposes. Here you’ll find the origin of the “NAFTA Superhighway” phrase.

Tiffany Melvin, executive director of North America’s Supercorridor Coalition, or NASCO, which was founded to promote development along the I-35 high-priority corridor and its connections in Canada and Mexico, says the phrase found its way into the public around the time of the organization’s founding in 1994. At that time, she says, the prefix “super” didn’t always necessarily mean “big.”

“There weren’t supersized fries and supersized drinks then,” she says. “By ‘supercorridor coalition’ we meant more than a corridor coalition, more than a highway coalition. We promote economic development, technology innovation and integration, environmental initiatives, educational consortiums, inland ports — we are not just about highways.”

NASCO pushes I-35 for development as a multimodal corridor with rail-highway interconnectivity and, utilizing high technology, new border procedures for trade processing and heightened security. Its overall drive is to position North America to compete in the global marketplace well into the future.

NASCO founders deliberately shied away from using “NAFTA” in the name because of the agreement’s political volatility. But, says Melvin, “a lot of people began referring to I-35 as the ‘NAFTA Superhighway’ because it does in fact carry an enormous amount of NAFTA trade on it, particularly in Texas.” Certain of their members, in addition to unaffiliated parties began using the term in their press materials and associated websites.

By 1999, it had been in circulation for more than five years, and the ISTEA had been reauthorized and partly revamped in the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), which, among other things, granted states more latitude in determining what they did with their federal highway funds. A reference to a “Partial NAFTA Truckway” appeared that year in the “I-35 Trade Corridor Study,” which projected development and demand on I-35 into the year 2025. The truckway item proposed dedicated haul lanes within the existing I-35 right-of-way to ease projected congestion between Laredo and Dallas-Ft. Worth, which was already thick with commuter traffic.

But by 2003, TxDOT had conjured and proposed what it called the “Trans-Texas Corridor” project. Governor Rick Perry has described the TTC as a “vision,” a statewide system of multimodal corridors designed to alleviate congestion over the long term.

Their thinking continues to be Texas-sized. TxDOT Turnpike Authority public affairs officer Gabriela Garcia says environmental studies are well under way for two possible projects, TTC-35 and I-69/TTC. Even the beginning of construction is far in the future, but what TTC-35 might look like is less than hazy in the minds of planners: an alternate highway roughly running parallel to I-35 but in its own right-of-way.

At full build-out, according to the plan, it might have four dedicated lanes for trucks and six for cars, in addition to further utilization of the corridor for pipelines, electricity and rail, including high-speed passenger trains. Where it connects with existing four-lanes, those roads would be expanded to six lanes. Combined with relatively new intermodal facilities in San Antonio and Dallas-Ft. Worth, it could serve as the beginning of what comes to the minds of many truckers when they hear “NAFTA Superhighway”: a high-speed alternate to slower local highways and other interstate-like roads, without the thick commuter traffic.

SAFETEA-LU (passed in 2005), the most current reauthorization of ISTEA, put more onus on states to determine funding sources for major corridor projects. It nearly doubled the number of high-priority-designated corridors and further enabled public/private partnerships to increase funding capacity, with private investment, for new projects nationwide.

The current master development plan for the TTC, says Garcia, is being provided on a $3.5 million contract by Cintra-Zachry, a partnership of Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte and San Antonio-based Zachry Construction. Cintra is the Spanish company that in early 2006 partnered with Australia-based Macquarie Infrastructure Group to become the lessee of the Indiana Toll Road southeast of Chicago, igniting a firestorm of criticism from the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, among others. Other groups, including the Indiana Motor Truck Association, backed the move for the funding it would provide the state for new-road and rehabilitation projects elsewhere. One was the proposed I-69 extension from Indianapolis to Evansville, which would be a toll road as well.

ISTEA made it possible for the first time for private entities to own toll facilities along interstate highways, and since then tolling has been utilized nationwide in a much more prominent way. After SAFETEA-LU further relaxed restrictions on federal funding for toll roads (in part by launching a grant program for various pilot projects), the Federal Highway Administration even launched a website dedicated to information about tolling best practices, regulations and opportunities (www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov/tolling_pricing/).

On Halloween last year, the American Trucking Associations came out against the private operation of existing toll facilities. ATA President and CEO Bill Graves told members, “ATA is prepared to lead a national coalition of highway users in opposition to these financing schemes that offer a short-term windfall but a long-term recipe for disaster.” As far as new toll roads are concerned, ATA supports a toll-free highway system.

Like the Indiana Cintra operation, TTC-35 and I-69/TTC are being proposed as tollways that will pay for their own upkeep and at the same time bring in revenue for the cash-strapped TxDOT.

But contrary to what many of the project’s local critics have been saying, says Garcia, if TTC-35 made it through the environmental studies and was approved for construction, it would go out for bidding like any other highway.

Backers of the Texas project stress its local nature — “It is solely a state project,” says NASCO’s Tiffany Melvin. “We’ve supported the creation of the new infrastructure because the congestion problems are so crucial in Texas.” But she likewise stresses that NASCO is still primarily committed in America to increasing efficiency all along the existing I-35 (and I-29 and I-94 along the northern segments of the corridor). Melvin points out that there is no plan to extend the future TTC-35 into Oklahoma.

Longtime Houston area-based owner-operator Danny Cochran, who’s leased to Waggoners Trucking and hauls cars mostly between his hometown and the Spartanburg, S.C., BMW facility, says he’s seen a lot of change in Texas. “It’s not like it used to be, when you could get a place to park traveling that area down by Laredo,” he says.

The I-69/TTC study area runs along Highway 59 right through his neighborhood between Nacogdoches and Livingston, but he says the roughest traffic is along I-35.

“About 45 percent of all Texans live within 50 miles of I-35,” says Garcia. “That’s quite a bit of the population. Anybody who drives I-35 will tell you it’s congested any time of the day.”

Businesses situated along the frontage road make widening the interstate in many places cost-prohibitive for the DOT and financially burdensome for communities along the route. A relief route like TTC-35, backers say, is the answer.

Garcia stresses that approval to even begin the project could be as much as a decade away. “Each of the environmental studies, tier one and tier two, takes two to five years, depending on the study,” she says. “Nothing is done overnight, no decisions are made behind closed doors — we’ve had three or four rounds of public meetings.”

“NAFTA Superhighway” was a buzz-phrase in some congressional races last year and not just in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry won after being beat over the head with the TTC issue in a three-way race (he garnered only 39 percent of the vote). In Kansas perennial 2nd district congressional challenger Nancy Bolda beat incumbent Jim Ryun after invoking the TTC as a precursor to a 10-lane NAFTA superhighway to blaze across Kansas in the near future.

But the future is hard to predict. It’s at least clear that the issues surrounding the TTC cannot be reduced to only local concerns. Whether or not something called the NAFTA Superhighway exists today or even in 30 years, the future will see only more need for efficient shipping lanes for international trade.

Laredo is the United States’ busiest southern border crossing in trade terms. Truck trade at the Laredo border has more than doubled since NAFTA went into effect in 1994. In 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 1,455,607 trucks crossed at Laredo, more than twice the number coming through the next closest southern port of entry at El Paso. The total value of NAFTA trade through Laredo stood at $93.7 billion.

Meanwhile, the port at Los Angeles/ Long Beach is bearing the brunt of the marked increase of Asian exports to the United States and vice versa in recent years thanks to China’s economic boom, and it suffers from extreme congestion.

NASCO and other corridor groups see the development of multimodal corridors extending from Laredo on both sides of the border as connections for United States/Canada- or Asia-bound goods landing at (or departing from) Mexican deep-water ports before making their way north by truck or rail (or east by ship).

Federal Highway Administration Public Affairs Officer Doug Hecox, speaking of forward-looking highway projects like the TTC, says, “We might not be around to see these. They’re ‘next generation’ in the most liberal sense. It’s nice that somebody’s looking at all the possibilities, and we’re very supportive of the process.”

Does this constitute a secret cabal attempting to destroy the American state?

Trucker Richard Skoglund doesn’t think so. Both the TTC project and the specter of the NAFTA Superhighway bring to his mind simply “something that is going to be very expensive to drive on.” The Arizona-based driver for North Carolina’s Davis Trucking says truckers won’t choose to pay for any toll-laden vision.

Skoglund predicts a “big ghost road” in the Year of Glad. “The future of tollways is here already,” he says, referencing the partial beltway outside Denver, though the E-470, completed in 2003 and circling metro Denver’s eastern side, is a product of pre-ISTEA practices. A trip along the entirety of its 56 miles for a tractor-trailer costs a whopping $47. “You’re barely making that much in the truck,” says Skoglund. “Nobody I know takes it.”