History
The Indiana Toll Road was publicly financed and constructed during the 1950s. It opened in stages, east to west, between August and November 1956. The formal dedication ceremony was held on September 17, 1956.
The final course of the Toll Road was the northern of four planned alignments. In addition to the east–west toll road, a north–south toll road was planned, roughly along the path of today's I-65, but the plan was dropped after the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was passed.
Originally the I-94 designation was applied to the highway west of where the current interchange with I-94 was eventually built, with I-90 following I-80 to the west along the Borman Expressway as I-94 does now, the completed portions of the Borman being designated as I-80, I-90, and I-294. The current arrangement was applied around 1965, to avoid confusion (had been caused by I-80, I-90, and I-94 all changing roadways there), and as a result, a stretch of I-94 is actually farther south than I-90, and I-90 runs the entire length of the Indiana Toll Road. (I-294 was cut back to the Tri-State Tollway at that time, and thus no longer entered Indiana.)
Several interchanges on the Toll Road were constructed between 1980 and 1985 as part of a bond sale in October 1980.
Similar to the Chicago Skyway transaction in 2004, on June 29, 2006, Indiana received $3.8 billion in an auction from a consortium made up of the Spanish construction firm Cintra and the Macquarie Atlas Roads (MQA) of Australia in exchange for the right to maintain, operate and collect tolls for the following 75 years. The two companies formed the Indiana Toll Road Concession Company to operate the road. Goldman Sachs & Co. was reported to have earned some $20 million in fees for putting together the ITR transaction. Mark Florian, who worked on both toll road deals, was subsequently named third-in-charge and chief operating officer of a newly structured municipal finance and infrastructure group at Goldman. Florian was to move from Chicago to the New York office.
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