It's tempting to say E-470 is just another highway, albeit one that requires tolls, but the road is significant for a number of reasons.

It's one of the first in the nation built with a public-private partnership. It's one of the first to have technology embedded in the road to read and gather electronic tolls. And it's among the first to be built with a design-build contract.

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Whereas most roads are built by public officials acting for a city, state or county, E-470's first board included developers who donated right-of-way land to the project.

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Pushed to the brink, E-470 notched another first: signing a public-private partnership with the contractor, Morrison Knudsen (now known as Washington Group International), chosen to design and build Segments II and III, to help it find financing.

The contracts were groundbreaking in several ways.

"Design-build" contracts, where the contractor takes an idea and does both the design and the construction, were new.

Typically, the owner -- such as a county, state or authority -- would pay one firm to do the design and then pay another contractor for the construction. Design-build contracts package the two jobs into one to save time and money. Today, the same design-build concept is being used to build the T-REX highway widening and light-rail project along I-25.

And bringing the contractor in on the financing side made the project a true "public-private partnership," Hogan said.

There's a lot more, but it's the same set-up as the road in France.  They're calling it a public-private partnership (ppp) but it all amounts to the fact that the government and the citizens don't "own" the road.  The government still does have an interest in it, as did France, but could divest themselves of it at any time.

Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding. -Hobbes

• were built low-quality (bumps and freezing damage forming quickly, cracking bridges),
  
• had toll policies aimed at the more well-off,
  
• ...but were so expensive (by local standards) that even the more well-off were dismayed,
  
• hence, even much of the traffic that previously used the previously built sections of those highways chose the parallel country roads,
  
• also hence, the operation of these consortia was deficitary.

On one big motorway, APRR, the French are even going to have a private foreign owner on board, Macquarie, the first private airport operator worldwide, who has also acquired Chicago Skyway (real toll road) at the end of last year.

When through hell, just keep going. W. Churchill

Two things changed in recent years:

• EU rules forced new highways to be funded on a stand alone basis (in the past, the traditional method was to finance new - lower profitability, because of the lower traffic - highways by extending concessions on older - more profitable - highways. This unduly faviored the existing operators;

• several of the existing operators have now been partly privatised. They are still heavily regulated by the State (and parties to these long term financing arrangements), but no longer publicly owned.