Designing Private Funding Programs for Public Highways

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, municipalities have experienced serious erosion in their ability to fund highway improvements using conventional funding sources, and are turning to private sources. Local officials have often sought guidance in the design of such programs from a growing body of literature describing experience in such efforts around the nation. However, it can be difficult to select those elements of others' experiences that are relevant to the current situation. A decision structure is proposed to aid local officials in designing their programs. An extensive literature search and analysis of case studies were used to illuminate the underlying structure of existing programs. The results were generalized to obtain a detailed structure describing the basic attributes of all types of funding programs, a set of external factors that governments must consider when designing the programs, and an examination of the relationship between the external factors and the choice of program elements.