Archives

Expanding Congested Highways: Revisiting “Induced Demand”

I get tired of major media repeatedly publishing feature articles claiming that it’s futile to add capacity to urban expressways. Yet they keep appearing, not just in niche publications but in major media such as: – “Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?” New York Times, January 6, 2023 – […]

A Fiscally Responsible Highways Reauthorization Bill

The U.S. government’s fiscal situation is going from bad to worse. Neither the White House nor Congress has proposed any measures toward anything like a balanced budget, leading to increasing concerns about our government’s fiscal solvency. – In December, former Comptroller General David Walker told Congress that he sees a 70% chance of a serious […]

Farewell to New York’s Cordon Charge System?

My first exposure to the idea of congestion pricing was in the 1970s, when future Nobel economics laureate William Vickrey and the Urban Institute were studying cordon charging for big cities such as New York. But a practical way of collecting cordon tolls without toll booths stymied progress for decades (until the advent of all-electronic […]

Sustaining Transportation Infrastructure When the Free Money Runs Out

My July Public Works Financing column on preparing transportation infrastructure for federal insolvency led to my chairing a panel at the early-December Government P3 conference in Washington, DC. ARTBA government affairs chief Dean Franks, Fitch Ratings’ Scott Monroe, and I had a lively discussion plus Q&A, with good attendance despite it being the last session […]

Time to Expand Private Activity Bonds for P3s

These are boom times for revenue-risk DBFOM P3 highway and bridge projects. The current pipeline includes three huge projects being offered by Georgia DOT in Atlanta, a planned $2 billion bridge across the Mississippi River planned by Louisiana DOTD, North Carolina DOT’s $3.1 billion I-77South express toll lanes project, and four express toll lane projects […]

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 […]