Archives

One Solution for Two Major Transportation Problems

Two serious transportation problems were not addressed by the IIJA legislation: rebuilding our aging Interstate highways and jump-starting the shift from per-gallon fuel taxes to per-mile charges. Both of these could be addressed via a single measure in the 2026 surface transportation reauthorization. In 2019 the Transportation Research Board released a major study, requested by […]

Why U.S. Airport P3s May Finally Happen

The conventional wisdom about airport privatization holds that the US is different from other countries. In one sense that is true. Airports Council International reports that 75% of airline passengers in Europe use privatized airports (as do 66% in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 47% in the Asia-Pacific region). In the US it’s only […]

Texas’s Contradictory Anti‐Tolls Policy

In recent years Texas legislators have reversed the state’s embrace of tolling and long-term P3s that led to multi-billion-dollar express toll lane projects in the Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston metro areas. Long lists of proposed P3s to expand formerly planned networks of express toll lanes in those two metro areas have been rejected by legislators. […]

Reforming Environmental Litigation

The transportation community is well aware that opponents of major projects use litigation to challenge Environmental Impact Statements after they are issued. While Congress in recent years has enacted modest reforms regarding the time frame and page count of EISs, it has not considered any reforms that would limit the delays and costs imposed by […]

Preparing Transportation for Federal Insolvency

Many transportation organizations seem to be assuming that the federal funding levels of the IIJA legislation will be the new baseline in the 2026 reauthorization of the Highway Trust Fund. For example, the American Society of Civil Engineers recently put out a report claiming that not renewing IIJA would cost the U.S. economy $637 billion […]

Trouble in Toll Land

Despite (or perhaps because of) the ongoing increase in tolled U.S. lane-miles, tolling is under new political attacks in 2024. Here are four disturbing developments during the first half of 2024: – After Oregon DOT had gained approval from FHWA to implement variable tolls on a stretch of I-5 in Portland, Gov. Tina Kotek abruptly […]

The Problem with VMT Reduction Policy

Much-needed congestion-reduction projects in California are at risk of being cancelled, due to a little-noticed change that was legislated in 2013 but has taken about a decade to be fully implemented. SB 473 requires highway policy to no longer focus on its traditional goal of improving level of service (LOS), which often leads to widening […]

Lessons from the Key Bridge Collapse

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge has dominated transportation news in recent weeks. Americans have learned a lot about the enormous size of container ships and the potential vulnerability of major bridges. But some important lessons from this disaster are not yet widely understood.

Misunderstanding U.S. Highway P3s

For some reason, transportation scholars in Europe and Latin America consider long-term DBFOM P3s as risky endeavors that don’t offer the benefits that advocates of U.S. P3s offer to policymakers, such as significant risk transfer from taxpayers to investors and an operating culture that seeks to satisfy customers on a long-term basis.

A New Perspective on Truck Tolling

Trucking industry opposition to toll-financing of the replacement I-10 bridge in Louisiana nearly killed this critically important P3 project last fall. Fortunately, this $2.1 billion revenue-risk P3 has been rescued by the legislature, after negotiations that revised the financing plan by reducing toll rates for trucks (and for very local users) and increasing the extent […]