The Turnpike Revolt

November 1, 2023·57 min·3 clips

A convenience store magnate and a talk radio host held majority control over the largest infrastructure project in American history — and Karasiotis put them there because he thought he could buy them.

The tolls were vulnerable. Free the Pike had pushed long enough to put the Mass Pike's future in front of voters, and the stakes were easy to understand. Kill the tolls and the Turnpike Authority gets hit too, along with toll collection jobs and the golden goose the host talks about. Then Election Night made everything feel smaller and stranger. The country watched Florida while Doug Barth waited to see whether his long-shot campaign had enough fuel. It did not. A political cartoon had him walking back to a broken-down Free the Pike car with a gas can. From there, the episode asks the practical question: what did blue toll booths have to do with the Big Dig? Money, mostly. As the project's costs climbed and its reputation sagged, the federal support everyone expected started shrinking. Ninety cents became fifty. That left the state hunting for billions the interstate trust fund would not cover. The toll booths were sitting right there. They could help fill the gap without making the bill land on everyone at once. But it looked bad, and people noticed. Using Mass Pike tolls for the Big Dig made the burden feel like a tax on people who happened to live in the project's path. Toll payers were not covering the whole thing, but they could see themselves being tapped to patch the hole. The revolt failed at the ballot. The anger did not disappear.

As heard by us

A toll fight becomes a sharp lesson in who pays when civic ambition outruns the money.

The piece turns a fight over Mass Pike tolls into a clear look at how a public megaproject gets financed after the original promise begins to fray.

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Why you'd press play

If you want the toll-war chapter that shows how the Big Dig bill got covered, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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