Abstract
As this is being written, the nation is still waiting for the legislative package that would address the country’s long-standing infrastructure needs. The fact that such a bill does not yet exist as the U.S. Congress prepares to leave the Capitol for Summer recess underscores the difficulties inherent in such a massive undertaking. In the last issue of PWMP, we addressed the question of whether the U.S. needed a “national infrastructure policy.” A more germane question in these contentious times may be how the nation’s law makers come together to do what a majority of the nation says they need and want. Perhaps only time will tell.
Meanwhile, PWMP remains committed to providing timely and relevant content to policy makers, practitioners, and researchers to ensure that the needs of people, the environment, and the economy are met by infrastructure projects that are effective, efficient, and equitable. To that end, this issue of PWMP contains four technical papers on a variety of topics along with reviews of two recent books: one on the ecological impacts of the Chinese “Belt and Road” initiative and the other on a dam removal and restoration project on the Penobscot River in the U.S. state of Maine.
In “Opting Out of Transit: How Does Strong Local Autonomy Impact Allocation of Transit Service in a Multi-Jurisdictional Transit Agency?” David Weinreich and Ahmad Bonakdar examine how the voluntary nature of local membership in transportation agencies can impact resource allocation to transit projects and services. Using historical case study analysis from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system (DART), the study concludes that authorizing legislation allowing local jurisdictions to opt out of transit districts weakens regional planning capacity by favoring the wishes of each municipality and creates a structure making it difficult to allocate scarce transit dollars based on transit need and social equity goals.
Michelle Oswald Beiler and Evan Filion in “Amtrak Rail Trespasser Analysis Using a GIS Space-Time Approach” analyze trespasser-train incident data from 2011 to 2019. They found that Northern and Southern California have the highest trespassing risk in the country, followed by the Northeast and Great Lakes megaregions. Four Amtrak corridors were identified as hot spots, including three along coastal California railways and the Philadelphia region. Not surprisingly, they found that unauthorized people walking on the tracks was the prominent cause of adverse trespasser-train incidents and suggest ways to reduce the likelihood of such events.
Project labor agreements (PLAs) are commonly found on large public works projects in California’s urban areas, but their use remains a controversial public procurement practice. In “Do Project Labor Agreements Reduce the Number of Bidders on Public Projects? The Case of Community Colleges in California,” Peter Philips and Emma Waitzman examine whether PLAs reduce the number of bidders on public projects. They analyzed 263 bid openings for community college construction in California over the period 2007 to 2016 and found that the number of bidders on a project was not altered by the presence or absence of PLAs. The study also found that when compared to engineer’s estimates, the lowest bids on prevailing wage projects were not higher than the lowest bids on projects without PLA agreements.
In “Retro or renewal: An assessment of PPP management and policy in China since 2014,” Jianming Cai, Jing Lin, Zhenshan Yang, Xinfa Zhou, Zhe Cheng compare China’s growing use of public private partnerships (PPP) in the last several years with that in the past thirty years. They identify and analyze seven new characteristics of Chinese PPP, diagnose the nature and performance of the recent PPP boom, and conclude that the process could be better managed by the Chinese government if some identified prerequisites are met.
This issue concludes with reviews by Kyle Shelton, Director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota of “In the Way of the Road: The Ecological Consequences of Infrastructure” and by Richard Little, Editor of PWMP of “From the Mountains to the Sea: The Historic Restoration of the Penobscot River.”