Sulayman BowlesIndependent research / Texas

Method & definitions.

Version 1.0 · 2026-10-22
The unit of research is an evidenced relationship, not a map marker. The initial release covers toll roads only.

Ownership is not one field

Legal title describes the public asset. A concession is a finite contractual right. Operation and billing are service relationships. Equity is a claim on a company. A creditor has a financing claim, not an automatic ownership share of the roadway.

Public authorities can hold project and financial rights without this database certifying every underlying deed. Those qualifications remain in each profile. Investor affiliate chains and individual bondholders are not fully enumerated.

Time and missing information

Every relationship retains a source snapshot, status and any evidenced effective dates. Null means unverified or not applicable, never zero. Concession expiry years are year-precision fields. Historical financing is explicitly historical. The map filters current profile classifications; the History view shows selected prior changes, not a reconstructed statewide time slider.

Geographic precision

The Texas context polygon comes from TxDOT’s public GIS service, in WGS84, generalized server-side with a 0.01-degree tolerance. It carries TxDOT Transportation Planning and Programming Division attribution.

The three regional anchors are editorial approximations, rounded to 0.1 degree. They do not locate a road, toll gantry, right-of-way or asset centroid. Profiles inherit a region locator. GeoJSON exports repeat that precision and contain no road LineStrings. This map cannot be used for routing or parcel decisions.

Financial accounting

Net toll revenue, operating revenue, operating expense, debt carrying amount and sponsor project debt are distinct metrics. Nominal USD values retain the fiscal period, reporting entity, source locator and original basis. No financial sum is computed across the ten profiles.

The NTTA System excludes third-party service activity. CTRMA observations include System and non-System MoPac; MoPac is outside the System bond indenture. CTTS and SH 130 South do not share one debt pool. Public debt carrying values include accounting adjustments; rounded sponsor debt is displayed separately.

CTTS and Grand Parkway per-$100 values use one FY2025 HB 803 schedule. The residual is arithmetic, not a reserve requirement or free cash. Reproduce with the Python script and inspect the CSV inputs.

Evidence refresh and exclusions

  • Parcel-level title and concession route geometry are not verified. All map markers are regional locators.
  • Current SH 130 equity percentages, full ultimate investor chain and current debt remain unverified.
  • Bondholder identities and full management / maintenance contractor inventories are not established.
  • Only four public reporting entities have multi-year financial observations. Missing concession metrics remain absent.
  • HCTRA and CTTS original PDFs could not be refreshed in this session; prior primary text was rechecked and the access limits are recorded.
  • An inherited CTRMA FY2025 operating-cash observation differs from the revised PDF. Operating-cash data are excluded pending reconciliation.

Financial observations were selected from the existing research at revision 96a6bc20cf2e3269683e1e743fc071704a4240ab and rechecked as recorded in the source register. Data from that research are not automatically treated as reverified. The CTRMA operating-cash discrepancy remains excluded.

Expanding verified coverage

  1. Toll roads: add individual facility records only after reconciling the entity perimeter and acquisition of a primary title or project-right source. Obtain route geometry from TxDOT or a licensed agency GIS feed; record its date, license, CRS and accuracy before displaying it.
  2. Electric utilities and transmission: start with PUCT utility/service-territory records, ERCOT transmission owners, SEC utility filings and rate-base/debt definitions. Distinguish asset ownership from retail supply and grid operation.
  3. Water: verify TCEQ public-water-system IDs, TWDB financing and local utility audits. Distinguish utility systems, plants, water rights and management contracts.
  4. Ports and airports: use port-authority and airport enterprise audits, bond disclosures, leases and FAA records. A terminal concession is not ownership of an entire airport or port.
  5. Publish: add primary sources, dated relations and explicit gaps; validate referential integrity, period and geography constraints, regenerate exports, test keyboard/mobile behavior, pass repository CI and verify the production commit.

Sector fields are reserved in the model; unresearched sectors have no fabricated pins or inactive product tabs. Corrections should record the affected stable IDs, old and new claim, source, reviewer and revision date.

Reproduce the release

Download atlas.json and reproduce.py into the same directory. Run python reproduce.py. This validates IDs and equity sums, calculates the same-basis comparison, and writes a relational SQLite database. No third-party Python libraries are required.

Original database selection and commentary: CC BY 4.0. Primary documents retain their original rights. Agency links open the source documents; cached private-company documents are not redistributed.