Public Works Management & Policy

Policy makers have been hearing a great deal about how privately financed and operated toll roads may be the best solution to the nation's chronic underinvestment in its highway system. This commentary provides some background about these examples of privatization and outlines the questions that policy makers should ask when they consider the latest private toll road proposal.

Public works agencies are focusing increasingly on the concepts of quality and customer service in response to growing demands for accountability and improved performance. In an effort to gauge customers' satisfaction with the services they provide, state transportation departments are beginning to solicit feedback from their customers to complement more traditional performance measures. This article reports the findings of a large-scale survey of the principal customers of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation's highway maintenance program. The sample size and the disproportionally stratified sampling strategy were aimed at providing reliable data for 67 individual county-level maintenance units. The results indicate widespread variation in motorists' ratings of road quality, which correlate moderately with more traditional engineering-oriented measures of road quality, but it is clear that they offer a different perspective on service quality, which transportation departments will have to learn more about if they are serious about improving customer satisfaction.

Throgmorton has argued that survey results are tropes, or rhetorical devices, that establish a context for the frankly political debates that occur within planning processes. Planners responsible for the economic evaluation of plans and projects increasingly are using a particular type of survey, the contingent valuation (CV) survey, to estimate the value of public goods such as water quality and recreation. It is argued in this article that CV is a useful tool for planning and that, following Throgmorton, planners will be more effective if they accept the idea that the results of CV surveys are both scientific and contestable. In this study, the CV-type questions about willingness to pay provided information not available from conventional surveys and helped local decision makers gauge the strength of local support for a parks board. Effective use of CV, like use of other survey data, requires that planners be competent technically and politically.

The $6 billion Canada Infrastructure Works Program, which began in 1993 and was renewed in 1997 with an infusion of another $1.3 billion, was justified on the basis that there was an infrastructure “need gap.” This article examines Canadian literature of the past 10 years on infrastructure needs and the justifications and challenges of infrastructure investment with a view to inform policy discussion. The literature can be categorized into situation reports and policy arguments. Economic arguments are the most often used; they focus on output and productivity growth. Environmental arguments are either polemic, focusing on the sustainability of resources, or technical, focusing on the sustainability of infrastructure. Social arguments are mainly speculative, with little empirical discussion of access, regional equity, and the redistributional effect of infrastructure investment. The jointedness of infrastructure systems, in a physical and a management sense, poses the greatest policy challenge.

Many federal initiatives now being considered are aimed at increasing the fiscal responsibilities of local and county governments in providing public works services. However, the feasibility of providing the necessary mix of public works in small towns is not easily accomplished, and there is a need to assess and evaluate the efficiency of the delivery of these services when they are offered. A method advocated to increase small town and rural county government efficiency in delivering such services is to share them with other towns, cities, and counties. A survey of Iowa communities was conducted to assess and analyze the extent of public works/services provision and sharing. The fundamental hypothesis is that the propensity to share services is a function of community size, which results in cost efficiencies in service provision. The results of the survey did not confirm this hypothesis. It may be that service sharing is more likely a function of organizational and institutional processes.

In recent years, various highway agencies and researchers have worked to develop efficient methods for maintenance planning, without much success. A major reason is that they usually neglect user inconvenience and delay costs, which alone can greatly exceed the maintenance costs. It is known that different maintenance plans have very different effects on users and on highway performance. These interactions have not been intensively explored, and the existing analysis methods are not quite satisfactory. To remedy the existing deficiencies, the development of a realistic and efficient maintenance planning methodology is proposed. Specifically, the proposed approach incorporates several components already developed for selecting and scheduling interdependent projects in transportation networks; however, it organizes them in a more efficient way. The proposed maintenance planning methodology can overcome the main weaknesses of prevailing methods and help decision makers to greatly reduce user costs and improve the efficiency of highway maintenance operations.

This article describes a model for resource allocation decisions between economic development and environmental investments. In the model, economic activity (the input) creates pollutant emissions moderated by process technology, investments in pollution control equipment, and regulatory control and enforcement. The net emissions (the outputs) create impacts: changes in natural resource quality, resource availability, and public health. The impacts in turn serve as inputs to interactive economic models. The general form of the model is uncontroversial. However, quantitative data are available for only 4 of the 11 major areas. In a regulatory arena based on scientific findings, decision makers deserve better support than this. The authors are publishing the conceptual form of the model to identify this knowledge problem, solicit participation in refining the concepts and addressing data deficiencies, and gain a consensus that will aim future research toward obtaining data that can support policy makers effectively.

Since the “container revolution” in the 1970s, seaports on the Pacific Coast have been the engines of economic development, regionally and nationally. But circumstances continue to change that threaten the long-term viability of the intermodal land bridge system that emerged from that revolution. These circumstances include railroads not maintaining rail lines critical to transcontinental container traffic and the shift in the locus of global production that raises the question of obsolescence for the existing infrastructure moving trade West to East from the Pacific Rim. The implications are enormous, especially for policy makers at the regional and local levels as they contemplate the potential gain and loss of economic development momentum in the interregional competition for growth and prestige. This research note discusses public developmental policy as both the core of the problem and a potential source for adjusting to the global dynamics of intermodal transportation.