Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s proposal to make the United States a “world leader” in high‐​speed rail would add more than $4 trillion to the federal debt for construction of new rail lines plus tens of billions of dollars of annual deficit spending to subsidize operating...

Congestion levels have grown substantially in recent years, while the traditional economic response to congestion – road pricing – remains politically infeasible in most locations. Tradable permits are likely to be a more viable alternative, because they do not require a net financial flow...

This paper uses a difference-in-differences strategy and an event-study analysis to evaluate the effect of Uber entries on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 346 US MSAs between 2011 and 2017. Empirical results demonstrate that Uber entries have no significant effect on the total VMT in a city....

We exploit the abundance of tax changes in the airline industry after the DOT's full-disclosure rule. We determine the "effective" tax rate and analyze how passengers reacted to the tax changes. Hausman-type instruments are used to address the problems arising from endogenously determined...

The purpose of this article is to show that, in Canada as in the United States, government regulation promotes sprawl through anti-density zoning, minimum parking requirements, and overly wide streets. However, Canadian cities are less "sprawling" than American cities- perhaps because at least...

In the midst of concerns about U.S. energy security and climate change, a wider use of biomass and biofuels is promoted as one of the recipes for sustainability. The production and use of biofuels in the United States has rapidly increased in the last several years, promoted by a variety of...

More stringent fuel economy standards and increased market penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) present challenges to federal policy makers who historically have relied on motor vehicle fuel excise taxes to fund highway projects. This paper considers the distributional implications of a...

Pigouvian taxes and user fees can address environmental externalities and efficiently fund transportation infrastructure, but these policies may place burdens on poorer households. This paper presents new evidence on the distributional consequences of the gasoline tax, bus and light rail charges...