Skip to main content

Infrastructure investors line up for Indiana toll road

According to a report by Reuters, some of the world's largest pension funds and infrastructure investors are forming consortia to bid for the operator of an Indiana toll road that filed for bankruptcy last month. Indiana agreed in 2006 to lease the 253 kilometre highway, billed as the Main Street of the Midwest, for 75 years in return for US$3.8 billion. It stretches across the northernmost part of Indiana from Ohio to Illinois, linking Chicago with the largest cities on the eastern seaboard. While f
October 16, 2014 Read time: 2 mins
According to a report by Reuters, some of the world's largest pension funds and infrastructure investors are forming consortia to bid for the operator of an Indiana toll road that filed for bankruptcy last month.

Indiana agreed in 2006 to lease the 253 kilometre highway, billed as the Main Street of the Midwest, for 75 years in return for US$3.8 billion. It stretches across the northernmost part of Indiana from Ohio to Illinois, linking Chicago with the largest cities on the eastern seaboard.

While former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels described it as the deal of a lifetime, opponents fought the agreement all the way to the state's Supreme Court, arguing the state was surrendering an important revenue stream.

However, almost as soon as the deal closed, the US slid into a deep recession and has been slow to recover from a financial crisis in 2008. Traffic volume on the toll road in 2013 was 10.7 per cent below the 2007 level, according to documents filed with the US Bankruptcy Court in Chicago.

Among the players cited in the report are 5428 Cintra, 4419 Ferrovial, 1813 Autostrade Meridionali and 6605 Abertis Infraestructuras. An auction is expected to kick off next month and a deal will probably value the road at $4 billion to $5 billion.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Global traffic management market ‘worth $64bn by 2025’: report
    February 7, 2020
    The global market for traffic management products and services is set to expand in value by 14% per year for the next five years, according to a new study.
  • Toll road tender announced
    March 18, 2014
    Moscow has announced a tender to build а toll road parallel to Kutuvkosky Prospekt, stretching from Moscow City’s business centre to the Moscow ring road and meet the M1 toll road. Expected to include four lanes of traffic, the US$1.1 billion project will take five to seven years to build, with the contract between the city and the winning tenderer lasting 40 years. The investor will be able to set the road's fare, though within limits prescribed by Moscow authorities. The city's head of construction,
  • IRD: from the ground up
    September 16, 2021
    IRD is undertaking a comprehensive review of its road safety and monitoring solutions. A series of initiatives is building on the company’s in-pavement expertise, bringing considerable additional value for the customer to the traditional range of products while complementing these with wholly new technologies
  • Considering accessibility costs little and pays dividends for all travellers
    August 8, 2017
    Catering for those with disabilities can be cost-effective and improve services for all travellers, as David Crawford discovers. Clearer understanding of the economic value of accessible transport is essential if we are to speed up the current slow deployment levels, according to the Paris-based International Transport Forum (ITF), which staged a 2016 round table on the ‘Benefits and Costs of Inclusion in Transport’. It wants to see greater availability of data on levels of actual and unmet demand for acces