Paying for the Fixed Costs of Roads

This paper explores alternative financing mechanisms to pay for the fixed costs of roads, particularly in cases without rising marginal costs. Mechanisms considered include tolls, gas taxes, and developer payments. The problems with each are discussed. An example looking at problems of temporal and spatial free-riding is presented.Transportation financing, economics, toll roads, impact fees .

Identifying Winners and Losers in Transportation

This paper explores the issues surrounding transportation equity for effects both external and internal to transportation. Several examples of transportation "improvements" imposing transportation costs on more individuals than who are benefited are provided. Beyond counting the number of winners and losers, several quantitative measures of equity are suggested. To that end, transportation benefit cost analyses should include an "Equity Impact Statement". This statement would consider the distribution of the opportunities to participate in decisions and the outcomes of those decisions (in terms of mobility, economic, environmental, and health effects) that different strata (spatial, temporal, modal, generational, gender, racial, cultural, and income) of the population receive. Policy makers would then have additional information on which to base decisions.Environmental Justice, Social and Economic Factors, Equity, Benefit-Cost, Transportation Evaluation .

Accessibility and the Journey to Work

This study analyzes the effect of accessibility to jobs and houses at both the home and work ends of trips on commuting duration for respondents to a household travel survey in metropolitan Washington, DC. A model is constructed to estimate the effects of demographics and relative location on the journey to work. Analysis finds that residences in job-rich areas and workplaces in housing-rich areas are associated with shorter commutes. An implication of this study is that, by balancing accessibility, the suburbanization of jobs maintains stability in commuting durations despite rising congestion, increasing trip lengths, and increased work and non-work trip making. .

Tolling at a Frontier: A Game Theoretic Analysis

Frontiers provide an opportunity for one jurisdiction to remedy inequities (and even exploit them) in highway finance by employing toll-booths, and thereby ensuring the highest possible share of revenue from non-residents. If one jurisdiction sets policy in a vacuum, it is clearly advantageous to impose as high a toll on non-residents as can be supported. However, the neighboring jurisdiction can set policy in response. This establishes the potential for a classical prisoner's dilemma consideration: in this case to tax (cooperate) or to toll (defect).Even if both jurisdictions would together raise as much revenue from taxes as from tolls (and perhaps more since taxes may have lower collection costs), the equilibrium solution in game theory, under a one-shot game, is for both parties to toll. However in the case of a repeated game, cooperation (taxes and possibly revenue sharing) which has lower collection costs is stable.

The Evolution of Transport Networks

Between 1900 and 2000, the length of paved roads in the United States increased from 240 km to 6,400,000 km (Peat 2002, BTS 2002) with virtually 100% of the U.S. population having almost immediate access to paved roadways. Similarly, in 1830 there were 37 km of railroad in the United States, but by 1920 total track mileage had increased more than ten-thousand times to 416,000 km miles, however since then, rail track mileage has shrunk to about 272,000 km (Garrison 1996, BTS 2002). The growth (and decline) of transport networks obviously affects the social and economic activities that a region can support; yet the dynamics of how such growth occurs is one of the least understood areas in transport, geography, and regional science. This is revealed time and again in the long-range planning efforts of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), where transport network changes are treated exclusively as the result of top-down decision-making. Changes to the transport network are rather the result of numerous small decisions (and some large ones) by property owners, firms, developers, towns, cities, counties, state department of transport districts, MPOs, and states in response to market conditions and policy initiatives. Understanding how markets and policies translate into facilities on the ground is essential for scientific understanding and improving forecasting, planning, policy-making, and evaluation.Transportation Network Growth, Transportation-Land Use Interaction, Markov Chain

Why States Toll: An Empirical Model of Finance Choice

This paper examines the question of why some states impose tolls while others rely more heavily on gas and other taxes. A model to predict the share of street and highway revenue from tolls is estimated as a function of the share of non-resident workers, the policies of neighboring states, historical factors, and population. The more non-resident workers, the greater the likelihood of tolling, after controlling for the miles of toll road planned or constructed before the 1956 Interstate Act. Similarly if a state exports a number of residents to work out-of-state and those neighboring states toll, it will be more likely to retaliate by imposing its own tolls than if those states don't. The policy implications for the future of congestion pricing are clear, if hard to implement. Decentralization of finance and control of the road network from the federal to the state, metropolitan and city and county levels of government will increase the incentives for the highway-managing jurisdiction to impose tolls. And tolls are a necessary prerequisite for an economically efficient strategy of congestion pricing.

Economic Development Impacts of High Speed Rail

This paper reviews the state of high-speed rail (HSR) planning in the United States c. 2010. The plans generally call for a set of barely inter-connected hub-and-spoke networks. The evidence from US transit systems shows that lines have two major impacts. There are positive accessibility benefits near stations, but there are negative nuisance effects along the lines themselves. High speed lines are unlikely to have local accessibility benefits separate from connecting local transit lines because there is little advantage for most people or businesses to locate near a line used infrequently (unlike public transit). However they may have more widespread metropolitan level effects. They will retain, and perhaps worse, have much higher, nuisance effects. If high-speed rail lines can create larger effective regions, that might affect the distribution of who wins and loses from such infrastructure. The magnitude of agglomeration economies is uncertain (and certainly location-specific), but presents the best case that can be made in favor of HSR in the US.high-speed rail, public transportation, economic development, land use, hub-and-spoke

Job and Housing Tenure and the Journey to Work

Tenure at jobs and houses, along with commuting patterns between home and work were studied for residents of metropolitan Washington. Two alternative potential outcomes were considered: (1) Because moving or switching jobs can be used as an opportunity to reduce commuting duration in an era of rising congestion, those who recently moved or changed jobs should have shorter than average commutes; and (2) Because most new residential construction is at the urban fringe, an area of longer commutes, those who recently moved to new homes should have longer commutes. Evaluation of the effect of commuting duration on job and housing tenure suggests that those who move on average maintain commute duration rather than having a major increase or decrease. This corroborates the idea that there are offsetting factors, where increases in commute lengths due to suburbanizing residences are counteracted by the correlated process of suburbanizing jobs. .

Equity Effects of Road Pricing, A Review

Are road pricing strategies regressive or progressive? This is a question that has been confronting researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers who seek to implement new mechanisms to raise funds for transportation while simultaneously managing demand. The theoretical literature is mixed, as is the empirical literature. In part this has to do with the various types of road pricing strategies that are being debated, different definitions of equity, and alternative assumptions about revenue recycling. Despite this seeming complexity, the literature is clear that equity issues are addressable. This paper provides a synthesis of the literature to date on both the theory of equity, as applied to road pricing, and the findings of empirical and simulation studies of the effects of particular implementations of road pricing, and suggested remedies for real or perceived inequities. To summarize, while there are certainly potential issues with equity associated with road pricing, those issues can be addressed with intelligent mechanism design that provides the right incentives to travelers and uses the raised revenues in a way to achieve desired equitable ends. These include cutting other taxes and investing in infrastructure and services.Equity, Transportation, Road Pricing, Alternative Financing, Tolls, Congestion Pricing.

Space, Money, Life-cycle, and the Allocation of Time

Allocation of time to various activities is known to be a function of various demographic, socio-economic, seasonal, and scheduling factors. This paper examines those variables through exploration of the 1990 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey, which has been inverted to track activity durations. The data are examined in single and multi-variate contexts. Two key issues are considered. First, to what extent does activity duration influence travel duration after controlling for activity frequency. This is tested with a set of models explaining travel duration. The data show activity duration does have positive and significant effects on travel duration, supporting recent arguments in favor of activity based models. Second, which is a more important effect in explaining the large changes in travel and activity patterns over the past thirty years accompanied by the increase in female labor force participation, the loss of discretionary time due to work, the change in metropolitan location, or the rise in per capita income. To examine this second question more rigorously, a choice model is constructed which examines both the decision to undertake an activity and the share of time within a 24 hour budget allocated to several primary activities: home, work, shop, and other activities. The utility functions for the activities are comprised of demographic, socio-economic, temporal, and spatial factors. The data also suggest that income and location have modest effects on time allocation compared with the loss of discretionary time due to working. .