All states rely on gasoline taxes as one source of funds for road improvement and maintenance. Historically, gasoline usage has been roughly proportional to road usage for most light vehicles, so the gas tax could be viewed as a user charge. Increasing fuel efficiency and alternative fuel vehicles reduce both the equity of the revenue source and its growth over time. At the same time, improved technology has made more direct pricing of road usage more feasible. This paper reports on the economic issues that arise in moving toward the more extensive use of road pricing as a substitute for fuel taxes.
When the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) adopted Statement 34, it changed the generally accepted accounting standards for state and local governments. GASB 34 required that agencies place the value of the assets they manage in their annual financial reports. GASB 34 allowed agencies to track the current value of an asset by using depreciation or a modified approach that focuses on the preservation (rather than depreciation) of assets. The modified approach requires that the condition in which assets are managed meets or exceeds self-imposed minimum conditions, thus requiring the use of an asset management system. The infrastructure management community assumed that this would encourage the adoption of asset management systems. The authors interviewed several large cities and found that they did not adopt the modified approach and instead used the depreciation approach. The message inferred through our findings is that asset management systems should be adopted because they represent good practice and not because of a change in accounting standards.
Transportation Programs aiming at moving welfare participants into paid work have been based largely on studies showing a spatial mismatch between the concentration of welfare participants in central cities and rapidly expanding jobs in suburbs. Most spatial mismatch research, however, has been conducted in very large metropolitan areas. This paper examines the relevance of the spatial mismatch hypothesis to welfare to welfare recipients living in medium-sized cities and rural areas. Our findings suggest that the spatial mismatch hypothesis and policies based upon it may not be relevant to welfare recipients living in areas in which the urban structure does not fit the simple model of poor, central-city neighborhoods and distant, job-rich suburbs.
This article uses the 1995 NPTS (Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey) to examine the most important socioeconomic variations in urban travel behavior. The 1995 NPTS is the most recent and most comprehensive source of information on local travel in the U.S.; moreover, it is the only survey that includes both work and non-work trips. This is the third in a series of articles in this publication over the past two decades using the NPTS to analyze the socioeconomic characteristics of urban travelers.
This study utilizes a balanced scorecard framework to assess the performance of less than truckload (LTL) motor carriers in meeting the expectations of their customers with regard to five critical dimensions of quality drawn from the annual "Quest for Quality" survey. Results of the tests suggest that LTL motor carriers attempt to pursue a balance in performance across the five critical dimensions of quality and that they prioritize the needs of their core customers over those of their peripheral customers. However, empirical support could not be found for the hypothesis that the ranking of importance of the five dimensions of quality are the same for the motor carriers and their customers. Evidence is also presented to show that multiregional and regional carriers tend to be perceived more favorably by their customers than their national counterparts.
Transportation planners use a variety of techniques to encourage citizen participation. With the growing need to include the perspectives of freight community members in planning, special attention is needed to develop an efficient and effective way to facilitate this critical exchange of information. Deteriorating pavements, bridges, poor roadway geometry, and congestion, could potentially impede the movement of freight. Members of the freight community best understand the impact of these problems on their "day-to-day" freight operations.In order to establish the most effective means of gathering perceptions of infrastructure problems, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) sponsored research on a methodology for conducting surveys of shippers and motor carriers. A series of Pilot studies resulted in the development of a telephone survey methodology capable of yielding a 60% response rate. A statewide survey (a sample of nearly 3,600 firms) achieved a 61% response rate and produced more than 2,200 problem descriptions, locations, and perceptions of the impact being caused by these problems.
The objective of this paper is to offer a method for the qualitative evaluation of comfort levels offered along walkways in major activity centers. Walkways facilitate movement of people. (For this paper a sidewalk includes any type of dedicated passage for pedestrian oriented activities.) Healthy street circulation systems should offer choices for the movement of people, particularly for walking and bicycling modes. A comfortable pedestrian circulation system within the street network is the focus of this paper. Major activity centers are defined here as largely frequented urban areas with higher density, mixed-use developments.A comfortable environment makes a journey by foot pleasant and enjoyable. What are the attributes of comfort in a pedestrian circulation system? This paper develops an evaluation method by conducting qualitative explorations and drawing on existing literature along with examples of comfortable pedestrian spaces in the US and in Europe. Although there are other issues that are equally important for pedestrians, such as safety, security, and convenience, only the key attributes of comfort are used to qualitatively grade the physical, physiological, and psychological comfort levels of walkways. This method involves two evaluation components: (1) Service Levels give standards for the overall desirable and undesirable comfort conditions at the macro level; and (2) Quality Levels look at finer details of comfort of pedestrians at the micro level.
The recent economic development of East Asian countries has remarkably changed the marine transportation market, particularly the container transport market. This paper provides comparisons by using the Gini co-efficient and Theil's entropy among the major world economies in terms of container port traffic concentration over time. In terms of container port system concentration, Hong Kong is the least concentrated country, while Thailand is the most concentrated. In general, a trend of decreasing concentration, as well as rising competitiveness, has been realized in East Asia.
Different data sources provide very different pictures of current wages and working conditions for truck drivers. This study compares wages and hours of truck drivers across two disparate data sets: the 1997 Current Population Survey (CPS) and the 1997 and 1998 University of Michigan Trucking Industry Program's (UMTIP) Survey of Drivers. The CPS is a nationally representative survey but the scope of questions is limited, preventing analysis of particular segments of the labor force. The CPS asks about typical weekly hours worked, but drivers may understate their total working hours. The UMTIP survey of drivers in the motor freight industry probably over-represents long-haul drivers but elicits more accurate responses about compensation and hours of work. For this study, each data set was divided into three different categories: all drivers, private carriage and for-hire. The private carriage and for-hire categories were further divided by union status. Statistical analysis shows that the reported hourly wage and average hours worked numbers are higher in the UMTIP data set than the CPS data set. Similarities were found when looking specifically at nonunion for-hire drivers, especially when focusing on hours of service violations. Results show that 48% of the UMTIP drives and 26% of the CPS drivers reported driving in excess of the 60-hour limit. A positive and significant relationship was found between weekly earnings and hour of service violations, suggesting that drivers increase their weekly earnings by driving more and therefore increase the probability of violating the 60-hour rule.
The effects of traffic delays on highway construction productivity at interstate work zones were analyzed in this study. It is shown that traffic delays can cause significant increases of the cycle times of construction trucks, which consequently cause considerable reductions in asphalt pavement construction productivity and result in an unbalanced construction condition. To rebalance the construction activities, additional trucks for material delivery must be utilized to compensate for the production losses due to traffic delays. Otherwise, the slowed material delivery will affect the subsequent construction activities, such as paving and compaction, and will reduce total construction productivity.
This paper evaluates the major innovative financing techniques associated with federal funds, and their applicability for highway projects in Indiana. Before any innovative financing techniques could be applied, the impact analysis on project's economic parameters has to be performed. The evaluation of the use of a specific financing technique involves the computation and analysis of financial performance measures such as Net Present Value (NPV) and annual debt service of the agency, as many financing tools incur debt. In addition, the impact on user benefits and total project cost are studied. Possible revenue sources for debt service payment also are identified, and from a legal perspective, factors such as eligibility, authorization parties, and administration of financing assistance are addressed. The paper primarily focuses on major innovative financing techniques associated with federal funding: the Test and Evaluation Project 045 (TE-045 Program), Grant Anticipation Revenue Vehicle Bonds (GARVEE), the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA), and the State Infrastructure Bank (SIB). Data from two proposed projects are used as case studies in the analysis.
This paper reassesses the notion of risk transference resulting through the introduction of private sector involvement in air transport. The paper challenges the belief that a change in ownership not only transfers the possible financial benefits from ownership but also the risks in question. While the new shareholders' investment will be exposed to risk, it is becoming clear from the responses by governments to a series of recent crises that they have not freed themselves from all the associated risks. The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of the transfer of risk in terms of the Privatization of the air traffic control system in the UK. The authors conclude that governments and capital markets have been bearing a bigger risk than they originally thought.
As the U.S. recoils from the terrorist acts of September 11 and its first exposure to bio-terrorism, it is tempting for those who develop public policy to concentrate upon the immediate and demanding counter-terrorism tasks. Likewise, the stagnating economy, with growing unemployment exacerbated by the same terrorist acts, rivets the attention of policymakers. Americans can hardly believe the radical changes in the positive view of life held only a little more than a year ago as the nation passed through the fabulous decade of entrepreneurial vigor, technology leaps, and heady productivity and economic growth, not to mention the historic switch from budget deficit to surplus. It is tempting to focus political energy, as in the counter-terrorism efforts, on the immediate actions necessary to restoring economic performance. Tempting, necessary, but dangerously myopic if all attention is focused on these immediate tasks. Public policy must also concern itself with tomorrow's economic health. Some thought and planning must go into setting the conditions that will allow economic growth to continue with as few obstacles as possible over the long run. That is the theme of this article. It will propose a set of public policies targeted on enabling sustained growth over the new several decades by putting into place a 21st century transportation infrastructure. This proposal is called the "Third Transportation Revolution."
In local zoning ordinances, it is easy to criticize minimum off-street parking requirements. Zoning in general can be economically inefficient, socially inequitable, harmful to the environment, and wasteful of limited natural resources. Zoning for parking may be nothing more than a well-bidden and largely unnecessary subsidy intended primarily for the benefit of the automobile industry and its many influential friends. What remains true, regardless of the veracity of any or all of the foregoing statements, is simply this: zoning applied to parking is among the most popular of all local planning tools-today as it was yesterday-and apparently tomorrow as well.
Statistics on transit from two sources, the U.S. Census Bureau Decennial Census and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), differ significantly and often seem contradictory. This article discusses why these statistics may appear different and how these statistics can both be correct. The Census statistics showed no significant increase in transit between 1990 and 2000, while the FTA statistics indicate that transit ridership increased 6.4 percent in the same time period. The author suggests that these statistics actually are counting very different things: the census counts workers while the FTA ridership statistics count boardings. If the growth in transit boardings has been greater for nonwork trips than work trips, most of the difference in the statistics can be explained. There are also indications that the number of boardings per rider is also rising, which would also change the relationships of the numbers. The present census format of asking what mode a person usually used in the past week also may underestimate the number of occasional transit users. In order to put the future measurement process in better perspective, trends should be measured in the share of all transit trips that have a work purpose; in the ratio of boardings to revenue boardings or the number of boardings per rider; in the private vehicle-transit intermodal linkage; in the linkage between usual use and yesterday's use; and in the impact of occasional users on total transit ridership.
