Adding Rings to the City of Houston

I'm reading through the 10/15/12 issue of ENR, and note that the Texas DOT is adding another ring road for the city of Houston, a 184 mile outer  loop.  Three segments (37 miles) were awarded on September 27, 2012 to Zachary-Oderbrecht.  This $1.04 billion contract includes 50 bridges, frontage roads, and drainage and utility infrastructure. 

Ring roads circle the center, they allow movement and development along the periphery.  They sniff about the center.  My relatives lived on the sixth Ringstrasse in Vienna before WWII.  We recently visited the building they used to own and found the daughter of the caretaker still remembering the grandparents.  That ring road was built outside the original city walls in open space that once was reserved for military parade grounds.  Ring roads strike me as the opposite of Roman city roads, which emanate from the city center and are outward looking.  

The poster at left was produced by the Rice School of Architecture, located in Houston. They collected ring roads from 27 international cities and layered them all at the same scale.  As it turned out, Houston has the largest system of those they surveyed, with Beijing  second.  With unlimited space to expand into, Houston, like the great sequoias out west, marks its age with rings.

Texas Senate Bill 1420 granted TxDOT the authority to develop the Grand Parkway through public-private partnership.  Some notable features are that the DOT, at its election, may choose to have the contractor provide 15 years of maintenance of the road after completion.   Zachary-Oderbrecht submitted a wide variety of alternate technical concepts for consideration by DOT, and 10 of these were approved and incorporated in the proposal. 

Design work will begin shortly, and construction is slated to start in early 2013. 

Does anyone have information on the awarding process?  How many proposals, etc.?  This will be a toll road, but the article does not indicate who is providing the financing, or how the revenue risk is allocated. 

If you have information, join the conversation.