If recent votes are any indication, Texans don’t like toll roads, but they do like Donald Trump. At some point, maybe soon, they’re going to have to make a choice between the two.

President-elect Trump in late October laid out some of his plans should he win the White House, among them the American Energy & Infrastructure Act, which he plans to pass in his first 100 days. In his action plan that includes abolishing the Affordable Care Act and restraining immigration, Trump said the infrastructure plan “leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives.”

Over a decade, Trump pinned the investment potential at $1 trillion. Private equity investor Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, an economist at University of California Irvine, developed the plan as senior advisers to the Trump campaign.

And on Wednesday, Trump's team selected Shirley Ybarra, a former Virginia secretary of transportation, to lead the president-elect's transportation transition team. Ybarra is credited with developing public-private partnerships in Virginia, which have been held up as a national model by supporters. She worked in federal transportation capacities during the Reagan Administration.

In the assessment by Ross and Navarro, they argue regulatory delays keep needed highway and bridge projects from happening, but it’s not the only hurdle.

“The second reason why America faces a huge infrastructure gap is a lack of adequate and innovative financing options,” the duo wrote. “Here, we note that those projects with strong and clearly defined cash flows are readily financeable in the capital markets.”

Further, Ross and Navarro point to a “private-sector solution” that the country can leverage.

“To encourage investors to commit such large amounts, and to reduce the cost of the financing, government would provide a tax credit equal to 82 percent of the equity amount," they wrote. "This would lower the cost of financing the project by 18 percent to 20 percent.”

Any of the projects, to repay the money borrowed from the private sector, would need a revenue stream, though that could mean higher tax revenues because of the economic development created, the pair argued.

“The plan also could be applied whether the facility was operated by the government, the private sector, or in a public-private partnership,” Ross and Navarro noted.

Anti-toll crusader Terri Hall of San Antonio called it a familiar story.

“That's code for P3s (public-private partnerships) and toll roads,” Hall said in a post-election analysis, referring to public-private partnerships pushed by a handful of Republican governors. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry – rumored to be headed to Washington for a role in a Trump administration – was a proponent of toll roads and private investment in highways.

Numerous large toll projects in Texas, however, turned off many voters as a method of delivering traffic relief. Commuters balked at paying gas taxes and then being offered toll roads in return to ease their commutes.

Perry’s signature project, the Trans-Texas Corridor, died under skepticism of the financial details with the Spanish company leading the private road effort and intense opposition from rural landowners. Another privatization deal for the southern segments of SH 130 ended with the road’s builder declaring bankruptcy and bondholder taking over management of the road as the Texas Department of Transportation worked with the lenders to lower toll prices to boost use.

The stumbles and skepticism turned Texans away from tolls, leading state legislators to ask for more money for transportation, with the caveat TxDOT couldn’t use the money to advance toll projects. In 2014 and 2015, voters approved what could be $3 billion annually in new highway money – which will fluctuate based on sales taxes and oil and gas taxes in Texas – but both ballot measures specifically outlawed using the money for anything but toll-free highways.

Still, some projects in the Houston and Dallas areas have been met with much more popularity. Use of the Grand Parkway’s newest segments in northern Harris County, for example, are far exceeding expectations and have quintupled since 38 more miles of the tollway opened in February and March.

Crews along Texas 288, meanwhile, have broken ground on a long-awaited project to add toll lanes down the center of the freeway from downtown Houston to Brazoria County. The project – one of the largest under way in the region – privatizes not only the new tollway but maintenance and operations along Texas 288 for half a century.

The handful of toll successes, however, do not deter opponents. Ultimately, Hall said, tolls are just another way to make people pay for rampant government spending, except this time the proceeds go to politically-connected companies. It’s something many of the people who backed Trump at the ballot box understand, she said.

“They're not fooled into thinking tolls are not a tax,” Hall wrote. “Their pocketbooks have already been sufficiently raided enough to know the dangers… Trump's anti-free trade message resonated because it hurt the American worker. Tolls likewise, hurt the American working class - and hard.”