Spain’s transport infrastructure policy has become a paradigmatic case of oversupply and of mismatch with demand. The massive expansion of the country’s transport infrastructure over the last decade has not been a response to demand bottlenecks or previously identified needs. For this...

We explore how benefit-cost efficiency and electoral support affect road investment decisions in Sweden and Norway. In Norway, neither benefits nor costs seem to affect project selection. In Sweden, civil servants’ decisions are strongly affected by projects’ benefit-cost ratios, with a...

We study road supply by competing firms between a single origin and destination. In previous studies, firms simultaneously set their tolls and capacities while taking the actions of the others as given in a Nash fashion. Then, under some widely used technical assumptions, firms set a...

The European Commission years ago adopted a policy of encouraging the substitution of motor carrier haulage of freight with rail and water carrier haulage, as part of its “green” agenda of reducing fuel consumption, emission of pollutants, carbon intensity, and road congestion. Regarding...

America's surface transportation infrastructure needs significant improvements and rehabilitation, yet Congress is uncertain about how to do this. Some want to significantly increase federal spending on infrastructure. Others want to end deficit financing of transportation and end federal...

The May 2009 Rose Garden ceremony for President Obama’s signing of new fuel efficiency mandates for automobiles was attended by a remarkable gathering of “bootleggers and Baptists” - “Baptist” environmentalists who were pleased to get a policy they desired, and “bootlegger”...

Sometime in 2010 or 2011, Congress expects to decide how to spend the $250 billion or more of federal gas taxes and other highway user fees that will be collected over the next six years. The process of doing so is called surface transportation reauthorization. A major point of contention in...

This study analyzes the effects of binding local speed limits on crash frequency on German motorways. Various geo-spatial data sources are merged to a new data set providing rich information on characteristics for 500-meter segments of large parts of the German motorway network. The empirical...

The routes of early railways around the world were generally inefficient because the prevailing doctrine of the time called for concentrating on provision of fast service between major cities and neglect of local traffic. Modern planners rely on methods such as the "gravity models of spatial...