Videos

A big chunk of French equivalent of interstates are leased to private companies that maintain them. People pay tolls every 150 miles or so and the money goes directly to the companies.

Watch the video. They didn't literally sell their streets, they sold the parking meters, but certain clauses in the contract means the city has to pay up anytime they want to do anything that might affect revenue to those meters so it suddenly becomes much more expensive to do anything different with that space.

Up until a few years ago, Illinois, and especially Chicago, had politicians and leaders who thought themselves untouchable, and acted that way.
This caused a lot of problems for Illinois, including the pension issue, political appointments, funding, selling off things to private businesses for kickbacks, etc.
Luckily the corrupt politicians also were sloppy enough to get caught regularly. Just looks at how many of the recent governors were convicted felons.
Michael Madigan and the Daily family were the poster children for corruption in Illinois. Since Democrats were the majority party, they kept control over the government for a very long time. Eventually, Madigan overplayed his hand, but the damage was done.

The state is finally starting to recover from the corruption, and Pritzker is actually doing a surprisingly good job as Governor, but the previous administrations were so damn evil.