In a recent article in this journal, Leuenberger, Bartle, and Chen called for public administrators to take a new role, utilizing collaborative skills, to design implementable solutions to promote sustainability in transportation. We examine this call by exploring the case of an international aviation initiative. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Aviation System Block Upgrades (ASBU) policy has been developed to provide a road map to modernize global air navigation. This article explores the case of the ASBU as an example of meeting the call for the new role for public administrators to implement sustainable practices. We find that this policy improves international air transportation sustainability in several dimensions, and that this approach is a model for implementing sustainable policies.
To improve the effectiveness of transportation professionals in their respective jobs and successfully meet changing capability requirements, public agencies often offer online training. This article presents the current practices of design criteria and delivery method of such training through a three-faceted approach: the review of published materials, an online survey of transportation agency professionals, and follow-up telephone interviews. This study revealed that some of the most important considerations of successful online training programs are (a) the inclusion of interactive components within the training modules to keep participants engaged, (b) a short duration for each of the training modules to retain participants’ attentiveness, and (c) the provision of quizzes to assess participants’ understanding of the material.
Most research on Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure development focuses on phases prior to construction. The implementation phase itself has received less attention. However, sound public–private agreements and project preparations can fail during project implementation because of, for example, unforeseen events and ineffective responses to them. We conducted case studies on two infrastructure projects to examine which management responses to events during implementation produce (un)satisfactory outcomes. We found that externally oriented responses or a cooperative stance between the public and private partners produce satisfactory outcomes in responding to events. In practice, however, management responses are often internally oriented and non-cooperative, resulting in unsatisfactory outcomes. We identified three explanations for this, related to time pressure in implementation, the organization of the involvement of external stakeholders, and project culture in the PPP. The article concludes with implications for management and policy of infrastructure PPPs.
This article explores the experiences of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar with infrastructure public–private partnerships (PPPs), and offers new insights into the development of the PPP phenomenon outside of the Western context. It analyzes their approaches to PPPs, including policy frameworks, the rationales for their implementation, and presents a critical examination of PPP projects’ development to date. In contrast to the international trend where PPPs have been used for the objectives of overcoming financial constraints or delivering public infrastructure efficiently, it is argued that PPPs in the three Gulf states are in their infancy, and their use has been restricted to sectors where the governments cannot deliver important projects. The article concludes by identifying the three Gulf states’ future directions in the use of infrastructure PPPs to deliver a broader spectrum of mega-infrastructure projects, particularly in light of dwindling oil revenues.
A legitimate argument is that the public sector must restore its contribution to the financing of the new infrastructure. However, for both political and economic reasons, an increase in broad-based taxes or debt seems to be off the table; new funding vehicles are clearly necessary. This essay identifies value capture taxation as a partial solution to this infrastructure funding problem. Value capture is a set of techniques that take advantage of the increase in property values to finance service and infrastructure improvements.
We analyze cost overruns in a large sample of public infrastructural investment projects in Portugal. The average cost deviation relative to the budgeted costs amounts to 24%. The large projects even have a higher cost deviation and a higher probability of cost overruns, which suggests that the public administration may not have sufficient expertise to forecast required investments and handle these types of projects. Cost overruns are more likely in election years, reflecting that politicians seem eager to speed up or conclude infrastructural investments, and thus, they inaugurate a new service to harvest political goodwill with the population. We document that cost deviations are reduced over time; however, this reduction does not appear to be the result of the new procurement laws but seem rather the result from the benefits of learning and increased fiscal constraints. A reduction in corruption positively correlates with cost deviations and the probability of cost overruns.
Institutional laws and arrangements such as prevailing wage laws influence the employment levels and wage rates of the local labor supply. Conflicting research, however, has shown that prevailing wage laws lead to higher construction costs, while others show little to no relationship. Most of these studies are completed at the national level whose results at the regional level may not be applicable. This article examines the impact of prevailing wage laws on construction wages in the Mountain States of the nation. Difference-in-difference-difference models were used, and results indicate that for the Mountain States, removal of prevailing wage laws decreased wages by 4.4% after 10 years of the repeal. However, because of the available data used in this analysis, the impacts of repealing the prevailing wage laws on benefits could not be determined, which from previous research could be significant.
Private finance-based infrastructure public–private partnerships (P3s) are globally popular, including renewed interest in the United States, but their performance remains contested. This article explores the meaning of P3 and the notion of P3 success, and points to multiple interpretations of both. It proposes a new conceptual model of the P3 phenomenon, including five levels of meaning: project, delivery method, policy, governance tool, and cultural context. Numerous criteria exist on which the success of P3 might be judged. These are as oriented toward politics and governance as they are toward more traditional utilitarian policy goals concerned with project delivery, or value for money (VfM). Indeed, governments have dozens of different goals in mind. Given mixed international results to date for VfM, it is posited that to the extent that infrastructure P3s continue to show popularity, governments may stress P3 success more on the basis of political and governance strengths, than utilitarian characteristics.
As the world is striving to improve water supply coverage, a significant number of rural communities are forced to turn back to unprotected sources due to service breakdowns of their water supply systems. Yet, these communities do not seem to receive the same attention as those building new systems. The purpose of this article is to reveal and diagnose the determinant factors of service failures and to propose mitigation measures to the rural water supply in Ethiopia. The study is conducted through a literature review and field discussions with experts (n = 48) and artisans (n = 35), who have been involved in the implementation, operation, and maintenance of the systems. Moreover, failed schemes (n = 20) were visited, and discussions were held with village elders of each water point. The findings indicate that lack of uniformity of implementation approaches, and institutional and organizational incapability of the local government aggravate the service failures. The further capacity building, institutionalization, and improving remuneration of employees are likely to reduce the problems substantially.
Low-income groups use transit in greater numbers than others. There is little scholarship, however, about how they afford the fare. Using interviews with 25 low-income residents and 15 transportation and social service professionals, this study provides a complex description of fare affordability. It finds that low-income riders are often unable to pay for trips that fulfill daily necessities and discretionary purposes. They manage to travel by evading the fare, exploiting free transfers, forgoing goods, borrowing, and using free fare cards provided by agents of the welfare state. Professionals are largely unaware of the many ways that riders regularly compensate for low funds including the large-scale interventions made by the welfare state into public transportation. Fare evasion enforcement and pricing can pose challenges to low-income riders. By incorporating knowledge on the role that welfare plays in enabling low-income ridership, policy makers can expand access to transit for low-income riders.
One of the most heavily traveled freeways in the United States closed for construction over weekends in 2011 and 2012. Some public officials publicized the closures by appealing to civic pride whereas others threatened nightmarish delays they dubbed "Carmageddon." In 2011, contrary to many media predictions, traffic flowed freely at volumes far below normal levels. Our analysis finds that travelers did not switch routes, modes, or trip timing, but instead forewent thousands of trips. Travel behavior changes were far more modest and mixed during the second closure in 2012. Although the lack of traffic problems surprised many public officials, we find traveler responses to both events congruent with past research. Traveler responses to the first event were more dramatic but short-lived, while more modest but durable responses to the second event suggest that travelers learned from, and were perhaps jaded by, the histrionics surrounding the first closure.
When locating new facilities, departments of transportation must consider how the wash water generated during routine winter operations will be managed. Previous research has shown that two options are likely to be the most cost-effective: (a) collecting and hauling off-site for disposal (CDISPOSE) or (b) connecting to an existing sanitary sewer system (CSAN). In this article, the cost-effectiveness of these two strategies for Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) maintenance facilities was evaluated probabilistically using Monte Carlo simulation. The probability CDISPOSE was the most cost-effective option was greater than 90% for existing ODOT facilities without sanitary sewer access if the sanitary sewer capital cost exceeded US$172,000. Considering all ODOT facilities, there was 90% probability CDISPOSE was the most cost-effective option if the sanitary sewer capital cost exceeded US$280,000. These results can be used to guide facilities management decisions regarding wash water management options for both existing and future facilities.
Water services, that is, water supply and wastewater disposal, are traditionally the responsibility of local governments. Many municipalities have joined forces to meet the challenges of increasing water quality requirements, aging infrastructures, and decreasing fiscal resources. Regional cooperation is claimed to generate benefits in various ways, but there are challenges to this assumption. This article assesses the benefits and challenges of regional cooperation through the following categories: economies of scale, socioeconomic and spatial disparities, autonomy and legitimacy, by comparing Finnish experiences with previous research findings. Our assessment concludes that the benefits and challenges of regional cooperation are not straightforward, not only dependent on the local context but also on the level and tradition of cooperation, especially on the degree of organizational autonomy.
Currently, more than 1.5 million people in the United States contribute to the maintenance of their local roads and streets through transportation utility fees charged on their monthly municipal utility bills. The fees are assessed for each property based on a particular land-use characteristic (the fee’s basis). Although their use continues to spread, transportation utility fees have faced legal challenges that generally relate to the basis a city uses to assess the fee and have limited their widespread application. This article examines the bases used by 34 cities in the United States to implement transportation utility fees and discusses how each basis relates to the success of transportation utility fees in the cities that have implemented them and in other cities that may consider adopting them.
This article reviews three impact fee programs spread across three continents (North America, Australia, and Asia) in a search for those impact fee design features that meet the nexus and rough proportionality principles and promote vertical equity. To meet the nexus and rough proportionality principles, we assert that the impact fee should vary by use, intensity of use, and type of infrastructure or service funded by the fee, and that the fee should be based on clearly articulated service standards. Finally, specific policies that may be used to increase vertical equity include (a) allowing developers to pay the fee in installments and/or at a later stage of project development, (b) granting impact fee waivers for affordable housing, and (c) exempting smaller properties from paying the fee.
This article serves as the introduction for the four articles in this symposium issue on performance measurement and management for public works and public infrastructure. The effective management of performance in public works organizations has received an inadequate amount of study in the academic literature and it is hoped that this symposium will provide the impetus for more research on the important of performance measurement and management in public works organizations. The complexity of and challenges to performance measurement and management in public works organizations, themes that cut across all the symposium articles, are outlined and discussed in this introduction article.
Public works decision and policy makers daily face myriad management problems. The problem of stormwater runoff management, for one, has for several decades received a great deal of attention, with much of that focused on reconciling the needs of natural watershed systems with those of the man-made physical and non-physicalsocietal systems that watersheds overlap. In other words, stormwater management has effectively been cast as a system of systems problem requiring a delicate balance among multiple natural and man-made systems. The authors propose a methodology with which stakeholders can first set and then realize expectations for stormwater management problems by using watershed- and system of systems–oriented perspectives. The methodology, Enterprise AID (assessment, improvement, and design) is particularly well suited to such a pairing of perspectives, and this article, therefore, shows how stakeholders in multiple and commonly disparate interests might best balance the stormwater management needs of watersheds and related societal constructs.
This research is an empirical analysis of the effects of the benchmarking of Efficiency Performance Measures on total costs for six Public Works service delivery areas based on data over the period 1998 to 2011 from municipalities participating in the North Carolina Performance Measurement Project, a well-established and nationally recognized performance measurement and benchmarking system. The results of this research are significant in providing empirical evidence that the benchmarking of Efficiency Performance Measures for the six Public Works service delivery areas had modestly positive impacts on total cost-effectiveness in a significant percentage of these Public Works service delivery areas. The results reflect that management decision-making utilizing performance measures in a benchmarking context, especially in Public Works service delivery areas, can be effective and that performance measurement and benchmarking can achieve identifiable efficiencies and modest improvements in cost-effective outcomes in Public Works service delivery areas over time.
Recent economic problems have led to a potential increase in the adoption of an availability payments approach by U.S. transportation agencies when creating public-private partnerships (P3s). In doing so, the public sector assumes 100% of the demand risk, relying much more heavily on performance management systems that contain key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure optimal private partner performance during operations and maintenance. Many existing performance management systems, however, suffer from a lack of alignment among KPIs chosen to ensure that all P3s meet societal or agency goals as well as project goals. Furthermore, the choice of KPIs and accompanying standards has resulted in standards that are too easily met or inappropriately weighed. Examples are provided from P3 contracts for projects in Australia and Canada.
Sustainability is vital to the future of America’s transportation infrastructure. Achieving a sustainable highway system contributes to overall transportation development. This article focuses on the development of a sustainability index that can be used to measure and benchmark state highway transportation systems. The index was derived from a principal components analysis (PCA) of 2007 U.S. state highway systems data. Seventeen variables measuring four dimensions of highway sustainability were utilized to derive a composite index. This study finds a wide variation in highway sustainability across the U.S. states and regions. The PCA-based index provides a simple and robust measure of state highway sustainability, enables benchmarking and tracking state highway performance, and helps states identify viable strategies for addressing the challenges toward a sustainable highway transportation system.
Researchers and practitioners who are interested in whether low parking costs may play a role in skewing travel toward the private automobile and away from transit have been hampered by the lack of systematic data on parking costs. This exploratory study reports on downtown public parking costs using a 2009 survey of public parking agencies in 107 U.S. cities. On average, on-street meters allowed parking for up to 2 hr and charged $1.00 per hour while off-street "commuter" lots charged $11 per day. Median fees for violating regulations ranged from $25 (meter violations) up to $200 (handicapped parking violations). Exploratory multivariable regression results found higher parking cost was associated with an increase in public transit miles in larger cities (adjusted for economic features of the city). This preliminary, exploratory study provides baseline data with which to compare future parking data that could inform parking policy’s influence on mode choice.
Track infrastructure is the most fundamental among various elements of urban rail transit (URT) systems, and thus, ensuring the optimal allocation of resources between track segments for inspection and maintenance is a vital objective of rail transit agencies. This article proposes an integrated approach, combing analytic hierarchy process, and improved fuzzy synthetic evaluation, to evaluate the potential risks in track systems and prioritize the inspection and maintenance of various track segments of urban rail systems. Three major steps are determining evaluation indicators, calculating relative importance among indicators, and deciding potential risk levels and crisp values (quantitative actionable results). A case study on a track segment of Beijing URT is conducted to illustrate the evaluation process. The result shows that the risk levels and crisp values obtained from this method are very promising and helpful in evaluating and ranking risk levels for maintenance prioritization.
As the paradigm shift from command-and-control statutes to collaborative partnerships increases, public administrators, policy makers, and watershed stakeholders will become more dependent on collaborative partnerships to solve complex environmental problems. This article explores watershed management partnerships and suggests a new typology of collaboration built on the variable of governance. The typology categorizes three types of watershed partnerships as interagency governance, cross-sector governance, and grassroots governance. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of watershed partnerships through the lens of governance structure will enhance public administrator and policy makers’ abilities to provide the best approach for addressing a particular watershed goal.
The purpose of this research was to identify alternative strategies for managing wash water generated during routine washing of salt trucks at Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) maintenance facilities lacking access to sanitary sewer and to assess their costs. Eighteen potential management strategies were identified and evaluated. Six of these strategies were included in a detailed cost analysis, which indicated that site-specific conditions directly affect the cost of alternative management strategies and that tying a facility into the sanitary sewer is not always the most cost-effective strategy. For a county maintenance facility with 12 trucks and 30 winter events, tying into the sanitary sewer was the most cost-effective strategy when the capital cost was less than US$173,640; however, when the capital cost was greater than US$285,333, four of the five alternative strategies identified were more cost-effective than tying into the sanitary sewer.
In the implementation phase of transportation infrastructure projects, unplanned events will inevitably occur. Although this is increasingly acknowledged, little systematic research has been conducted into what management strategies are best for dealing with these unplanned events. This article investigates how managers respond to unplanned events that occur in the context of a project during implementation, and which management responses produce satisfactory outcomes. To evaluate what strategies work in what contexts, we introduce multi-value Qualitative Comparative Analysis (mvQCA) and apply it to the Dutch A2 Maastricht transportation infrastructure project (the Netherlands). We produced systematic evidence that (a) internally oriented private management is associated with low satisfaction; (b) externally oriented management is associated with high satisfaction in responding to social, local unplanned events; and (c) that internally oriented management is associated with high satisfaction, depending in particular on the nature of the cooperation between principal and contractor in the project.
As directed by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) created the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) discretionary grant program for surface transportation infrastructure projects. TIGER used a multistep competitive application process to award surface transportation funds. TIGER applications were initially screened by U.S. DOT’s staff of technical and economic experts and the final awardees were selected by a Review Team of Modal Administrators and DOT Office of the secretary-level officials. The purpose of the research was to determine if the most deserving projects, based on an applicant’s benefit–cost analysis and the likelihood that benefits exceeded costs, were more likely to receive grant funding. We base the findings on pair-wise comparisons and on logistic regression models. Based on these analyses, we found that the outcome of the benefit–cost analysis (both quality and expected net benefits) was not a statistically significant factor.
The issue of citizen and stakeholder engagement is a topic of growing importance in the academic literature. Although there has been an effort to examine this phenomenon in the arena of highway transportation, little attention has been given to how stakeholder engagement can be applied to the maritime transportation industry. By employing a deliberative democratic model of participation drawn from the evaluation literature, we report on efforts to engage maritime industry stakeholders on the Ohio River in policy implementation discussions. We find that, in addition to the benefits of deliberation noted elsewhere in the literature, such engagement can result in the identification of workable, low-cost solutions to seemingly expensive infrastructure issues.
Transportation agencies have made significant strides to reduce collisions and increase capacity along strategic highway corridors. Efforts have led to the implementation of many different access management techniques along corridors, such as installing medians versus two-way left-turn lanes and closing median openings. Businesses along these corridors have indicated their concern that these new designs will have a negative economic impact on their business because of the lack of direct access to their properties. The objective of this study was to quantify the business perceptions of median treatments on businesses adjacent to multilane highways. Owners of businesses along treatment corridors viewed median installations with a more positive outlook following implementation of the median than they did prior to the installation. The performance of treatment sites in terms of reported impacts on business revenues indicates that there is no direct evidence of negative economic impacts due to median installations.
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) often includes technologically sophisticated devices, computer hardware and software, and communications infrastructure; for which traditional asset management tools are not always appropriate. In challenging economic times, it is essential that public agencies manage their ITS systemsmore efficiently, yet ITS asset management is new to many. There is a need to review different asset management systems for their ability to support the ITS needs of public transportation agencies. The primary contribution of this paperis establishing a method for making this comparison andidentifying measures of effectiveness to use for evaluating such systems. Thesemeasuresof effectiveness were identified through a nationwide survey of public transportation agencies and the method was demonstrated through a case study in South Carolina.
This article presents a model to enable managers to make better decisions regarding infrastructure construction management. The model accurately estimates preliminary engineering (PE) costs (synonymous with Preconstruction Services Costs [PCS]) of bridge infrastructure projects so that state, local, and private transportation departments can know what these activities actually cost and can better plan future budgets. It also enables managers of these public works to quickly identify potentially troublesome projects, thus enabling corrective actions to be initiated early. This article describes a comprehensive study of the factors affecting PE costs, a database containing 2001-2009 bridge project data, and models to estimate PE costs. The findings indicate that bridge projects exhibited a historical mean PE cost ratio of 27.8% of estimated construction costs, significantly more than expected or commonly believed.
Tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) imposed on state and local governments is a popular policy approach to limit the growth in government. At the same time these limits may hinder the ability of state and local governments to provide services and make investments in public infrastructure. We test the relationship between state-level TEL restrictiveness and the United State’s network of highway bridges. We generally find that more restrictive TELs have a weak negative impact on the percentage of bridges deemed structurally deficient but a positive impact on the percentage of bridges deemed functionally obsolete. The states with the most restrictive TELs, those that restrict both revenues and expenditures, tend to have a smaller share of their bridges that are either structurally deficient of functionally obsolete.
In this article, we present an asset management-based methodology for the integration and deployment of guardrail sensors into an existing Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The methodology employs a three phase approach that incorporates data modeling, spatial analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and cost optimization to provide enhanced decision support when integrating guardrail sensing capabilities into an existing ITS. The utility of the proposed methodology is illustrated through an example integration of a guardrail sensor network in high collision segment of roadways in a metropolitan area of Montgomery, Ohio. The results demonstrate that the methodology provides an effective means for planning new sensor deployments by providing a structured approach to modeling the existing ITS, identifying optimal sensor placement, and analyzing cost and performance tradeoffs to yield the optimal solution for a given set of requirements.
Highway pavement markings constitute a vital component in roadway transportation systems and provide crucial visual cues for drivers to follow the road. In 2008, the South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT) initiated a study to evaluate pavement markings on noninterstate primary and secondary roads in South Carolina. This article discusses development of a method for estimating and comparing the lifecycles of high-build waterborne and conventional waterborne pavement markings based on retroreflectivity levels. The method was developed using nearly 3 years of field data from 66 sites throughout South Carolina. The article provides an overview of data collection and analysis methods employed in model development. The analysis indicates that high-build markings are predicted to considerably outlast waterborne markings and are also more cost-effective, based on cost per linear foot per year, for two-way Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) volume levels up to 2,000 vehicles per day.