7 research outputs found
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Research Synthesis for the California Zero Traffic Fatalities Task Force
This research synthesis consists of a set of white papers that jointly provide a review of research on the current practicefor setting speed limits and future opportunities to improve roadway safety. This synthesis was developed to inform thework of the Zero Traffic Fatalities Task Force, which was formed in 2019 by the California State Transportation Agencyin response to California Assembly Bill 2363 (Friedman). The statutory goal of the Task Force is to develop a structured,coordinated process for early engagement of all parties to develop policies to reduce traffic fatalities to zero. Thisreport addresses the following critical issues related to the work of the Task Force: (i) the relationship between trafficspeed and safety; (ii) lack of empirical justification for continuing to use the 85th percentile rule; (iii) why we need toreconsider current speed limit setting practices; (iv) promising alternatives to current methods of setting speed limits;and (v) improving road designs to increase road user safety
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Are Public-Private Partnerships a Good Choice for U.S. Highways? A Review of the Literature
In light of chronic funding shortfalls and waxing highway construction and maintenance demands, public private partnerships (PPPs) (often though not always in conjunction with road pricing) have been garnering increasing attention from government officials in the U.S. and abroad. Despite many strongly-held opinions on PPPs – both pro and con – systematic evaluations of their efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and feasibility are all too rare.This paper is the first part of a research project that aims to rectify this shortage of careful, evenhanded, and rigorous analyses of PPPs by drawing on the research literature to develop a comprehensive PPP evaluation framework. Drawing on a careful and extensive review of the research literature, we (1) present the often misunderstood economic properties of highway and road infrastructure, (2) outline the rationales governments cite for engaging in PPPs, (3) review the various types of applicable PPP arrangements, and (4) describe the conditions and factors that influence the success of PPPs. In the final section, we emphasize the differences between financial and socio-economic evaluations of PPP in describing our proposed PPP evaluation framework for highway projects. These differences in focus – between shorter-term financial considerations and longer-term economic considerations – lead to an important point that PPPs are not revenue sources per se. Rather they are means by which projects can be financed, delivered, and operated, but may or may not do so more cheaply than through more traditional finance, delivery, and operation. To the extent that tolling may be implemented to generate a revenue stream for a private contractor, PPPs may allow governments to tap into new sources of funding. But in such cases it is the tolls that generate funding, not the PPPs.Despite this, and despite the potential efficiencies of private sector development and operation, PPPs appear to public officials as a way to generate “free money” for highway projects. But, of course, neither lunches nor highway projects are free. In attracting private capital, PPPs often redistribute costs and risks between the public and private sectors in ways that are not always clear to all involved. When project responsibility and authority is explicitly allocated to either the public sector or the private actor with the most relevant expertise and experience, significant efficiencies can be realized.Despite the desperate need for upgrades to California’s highway network, officials must approach the PPPs carefully to ensure that projects will generate public benefits that exceed public costs. Whether or not a PPP is a good deal for the public very much depends on the project specifics. When properly structured and managed, PPPs can bring significant public benefit, but poorly conceived projects may entail far more risk than enthusiastic public officials may realize. When it comes to PPPs for highway projects, the devil is indeed in the details
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TASK A-3: Examining the Linkages between Electronic Roadway Tolling Technologies and Road Pricing Policy Goals
The surge of road pricing projects in the U.S. and around the globe over the past fifteen years has been enabled by a set of new communication and transportation technologies. There is currently a wide array of technical configurations ranging from systems based on “tried and true” short-range radio communications to experimental systems relying on global positioning satellites. These technologies provide for a more efficient collection of simple tolls, and also facilitate a movement toward more dynamic, variable user fees.In this study, we provide a comprehensive literature review of eight road pricing cases to identify types of tolling technologies employed, given various policy objectives. In particular, we examine two examples from each of four types of road pricing programs: 1) facility congestion tolls, 2) cordon tolls, 3) weight-distance truck tolls, and 4) distance-based user fees. In the selected cases, we specifically examine various suites of technologies and evaluate approaches to their implementation in road pricing programs with regards to system design and policy.In our literature review, we first describe three major technical tasks to be performed—metering road use, calculating charges, and communicating data—that are implemented by a set of nine technologies varying from on-board units to global navigation system satellites. Secondly, we identify six primary policy goals of these road pricing systems: a) maximize underutilized capacity, b) offer a congestion-free alternative, c) generate revenue, d) reduce congestion, e) allocate costs to users, and f) develop a user-fee alternative to the fuel tax.In our careful synthesis of the literature, we find that two main policy decisions most often determine the selection of roadway tolling technologies: (1) the geographical scale of the road network tolled, and (2) the complexity of calculating the fee to be charged. The combination of these two factors can vary greatly – from tolling individual facilities with flat fees, to nationwide road networks priced with dynamic tolls that vary by vehicle class, time of day, and congestion level. Taking into account the severe funding shortfall for transportation infrastructure, serious concerns about traffic congestion, and related adverse environmental impacts, we expect electronic road pricing systems to continue to grow in scale as well as in number. While systems with newer technologies are continuously in development, the most difficult hurdle for road pricing programs is now less of technical feasibility, but rather political and public support for implementation
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Addressing Equity Challenges to Implementing Road Pricing
Many public officials looking for ways to increase the efficiency, equity, and financial stability of transportation systems are turning to metering road use with electronic tolls. While tolling today is easier and cheaper than ever, officials face many obstacles to implementing tolling – especially concerning equity. Accordingly, this paper examines road pricing equity from a variety of perspectives. We begin by developing an evaluation framework that defines three distinct bases for evaluating equity – free markets, equal opportunities, and equal outcomes. We then use this framework to guide a review of five case studies of road pricing – in San Diego, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Germany, Stockholm, and New York – that explore how equity concerns have been raised and addressed in practice. We find that equity was a central question in each case, alternatively motivating (1) the implementation of pricing (Germany), (2) the funding of alternative modes (San Diego, Minnesota, and Stockholm), (3) mid-course restructuring of the pricing program (Stockholm), and (4) successful opposition to a pricing proposal (New York). Successful mitigation of equity concerns have entailed: (1) careful planning of the project or program, paying attention to the dedication of toll revenues to both transit and highway improvements in and around the tolled areas to create constituents for the pricing program, (2) a limited geographic scope to central, congested zones, particular travel corridors, or particular market segments, (3) incremental implementation to allow for mid-course adjustments in project development, and (4) ongoing, substantive, and sincere public outreach and education efforts that have meaningfully influenced program design. 
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Evaluating the Costs and Benefits of Transit Smart Cards
Smart cards are gaining momentum as transit agencies across the country have been implementing them as a fare medium. Smart cards hold the promise of revolutionizing the way riders use transit, and how transit systems operate. But in order to adopt smart cards, transit agencies must purchase new equipment and upgrade their entire fare collection system – a very expensive process. In addition, many of the oft-touted benefits of smart cards are vague, and it is not at all certain if they are worth the high cost of implementation.This study examines how transportation agencies in three metropolitan areas evaluated smart card systems – the only three major transit smart card cost/benefit analysis studies that we found in the U.S. by the date of data collection. In addition to these three studies, we also reviewed other less extensive analyses that only partially address issues associated with the implementation of smart card technologies as transit fare media. In reviewing documents from these analyses, combined with information collected in the previous steps of the research, we found that the analyses are neither consistent with one another nor definitive to provide any systematic evaluation of costs and benefits of smart card deployment. These shortcomings are mainly due to: (1) difficulty of estimating many of the qualitative benefits, such as convenience for transfers and comprehensive regional travel data, (2) a significant variation in quantitative cost estimates among the analyses for unclear reasons, and (3) difficulty in generalizing costs and benefits among cases with the unique organizational structures and particular political issues in different regions.Given a lack of solid information available in the literature, we drew on the relevant studies available to identify the cost and benefit items of smart card media and systems and examine the level of reliability and certainty of information for these items. Then we developed a framework on how a proper transit smart card cost/benefit analysis ought to be conducted. With this proposed framework, we found that individual transit operators and multiple agencies bear the majority of the deployment costs, while transit users and individual operators enjoy most of the smart card benefits. The proposed framework sheds light for more comprehensive cost/benefit analysis to evaluate smart card transit fare systems in the current status of knowledge
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Task B-2: Status of Legislative Settings to Facilitate Public Private Partnerships in the U.S.
In the search for new sources of funding, federal, state, and local government officials in the U.S. have recently been exploring public private partnerships (PPPs). While promising, PPPs are neither a panacea nor an unwarranted gamble: both shining successes and troubling failures abound. Given the large variation in the efficiency, effectiveness, equity, and feasibility of public-private highway finance partnerships in past projects, federal and state officials have been enacting legislation and statutes to both promote PPPs and to protect public interests from the potential pitfalls of PPPs.In this paper, we review past U.S. legislation to promote and/or limit PPPs on transportation projects in order to evaluate their relationship with the recent planning and implementation of highway projects through PPPs. We also carefully examine existing state legislation that address issues on economics, public finance, and governance as well as technical details of PPPs in order to provide an overview of the status of legislative settings pertinent to PPPs in the US.Legislation sets the ground rules by which a public agency and private firms can settle on an appropriate PPP scheme among the many different forms of PPP available for designing, constructing, operating/managing, and/or financing transportation infrastructure. Specifically, legislation sets conditions that: 1) either promote or prevent PPPs for highway projects, 2) provide foundations for contracts between a public agency and a private firm, and 3) affect risks involved in PPPs for both parties. Legislation is the higher hierarchical instructional setting that determines the level of flexibility in contract negotiation between transportation agencies and private firms and, ultimately, the success of PPPs. While states with PPP-related legislation appear to have reached consensus on several issues (such as allowing for design-build projects, long-term leases, and use of the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act—TIFIA—funds), there is a huge variation among the same states in how best to deal with other issues (such as restricting what types of transportation projects are eligible for PPPs). This variation in legislation reflects each state’s general philosophical orientation toward PPPs: 1) aggressive (Indiana, Texas, and Virginia), 2) positive, but cautious (Arkansas and Minnesota), and 3) wary (Alabama, Missouri, and Tennessee). In addition, there are some issues and a certain level of details, such as toll rates and non-compete clauses that are more often worked out in contracts by the parties involved in projects that vary significantly in scope, scale, and setting
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Institutional Issues and Arrangements in Interoperable Transit Smart Card Systems: A Review of the Literature on California, United States, and International Systems
Many public transit agencies in California have implemented or are in the process of implementing smart card fare collection systems. Smart cards can provide riders with a convenient fare medium that eliminates the need for exact change, and offers riders one fare card that can be used across multiple modes, operators, and even different jurisdictions. For transit operators, smart cards can minimize fare fraud and pilfering, reduce operating and maintenance costs, speed up boarding times, and enhance data collection for planning purposes. One important objective of transportation planning in California is to increase transit ridership, and smart cards are widely viewed as a way to make transit use more convenient and appealing.To date, transit agencies in California have begun to implement smart card technologies either as stand-alone systems that are incapable of interoperability with other systems, or as “regional” partner schemas where multiple agencies serving contiguous areas agree to develop compatible systems. While there is still room for debate about the appropriate scale and size of interoperable, interregional smart card systems, California may soon have many dozens of non-compatible systems, possibly affecting the ability of riders to seamlessly travel across modes, agencies, and jurisdictions.The proliferation of many non-compatible systems may also have negative consequences for transit agencies. Unique, custom-designed, and incompatible systems may lock agencies into contract renewals with particular vendors, raising system costs over time. In contrast, common platforms allow agencies to more easily procure through truly competitive bidding, and allow agencies to achieve economies of scale, as well as collect more comprehensive travel data for planning purposes