The PA Turnpike -- poster child for government corruption, waste and stupidity
Since 1937 the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission has been a textbook case of bipartisan political corruption, government waste and stupidity, and bureaucratic arrogance.
It's also an 83-year-old argument for privatization and is a punchline for the childish question, "But who will build the roads?"
The commission is (and/or was) a job farm for thousands of toll takers and maintenance people, a source of millions of dollars for consultants and bond lawyers, a sink hole of public debt (billions), a builder of barely used four-lane rural interstates to nowhere, the most expensive state-long toll road in America, plus it's poorly maintained and mismanaged.
This well-done piece on the commission by Jonathan Silver, one of the best reporters still working at what's left of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette -- while several decades overdue -- focuses on the commission's arrogant lack of transparency and greed.
I suspect if the latest victims of the Turnpike Commission hadn't been the 500 union toll takers who were cashiered virtually overnight, the paper would not have done the story.