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On a single day in June, an Australian-Spanish partnership paid $3.8 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. An Australian company bought a 99-year lease on Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway, and Texas officials decided to let a Spanish-American partnership build and run a toll road from Austin to Seguin for 50 years.

Few people know that the tolls from the U.S. side of the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, go to a subsidiary of an Australian company - which also owns a bridge in Alabama.

Some experts welcome the trend. Robert Poole, transportation director for the conservative think tank Reason Foundation, said private investors can raise more money than politicians to build new roads because these kind of owners are willing to raise tolls.

``They depoliticize the tolling decision,'' Poole said. Besides, he said, foreign companies have purchased infrastructure in Europe for years; only now are U.S. companies beginning to get into the business of buying roads and bridges.

Patrick Bauer, the Indiana House's Democratic leader, says such deals are taxpayer rip-offs.

Bauer believes Macquarie-Cintra could make $133 billion over the 75-year life of the Indiana Toll Road lease - for which Indiana got $3.8 billion.

``In five, maybe 10 years, all that money is gone, and the tolls keep rising and the money keeps flowing into the foreign coffers,'' Bauer said.

The road, part of state Route 91, was built and run for $130 million by California Private Transportation Company, partly owned by France-based Compagnie Financiere et Industrielle des Autoroutes. The toll road opened in 1995.

Seven years later, Orange County was looking at gridlock. But it could not build more roads because of a provision in the lease. So it bought back the lease - for $207.5 million.