David Starkie

TRANSPORT POLICY AND ADMINISTRATION IN AUSTRALIA : ISSUES AND FRAMEWORKS

ADMINISTRATION AT THE COMMONWEALTH AND STATE GOVERNMENT LEVELS RESEARCH ORGANIZATIONS AND THE INTER-STATE COMMISSION

GRANT AIDING RURAL LOCAL ROADS - AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH

The paper points first to the significance of rural road expenditure in Australia and to the limited success of attempts to place grants for these roads within a framework of economic efficiency. Attention is then drawn to the merit good issue and to the findings of recent research which suggest that spatial equity and changing levels of aspiration are important determinants of road user attitudes. From this the authors conclude that disequilibrium between expected and actual road performance levels will be a salient characteristic and that road grants should be directed to reducing this discordance. A methodology for distributing grants is suggested and illustrated by reference to South Australian data. (Author/TRRL)

Investment and Growth: The Impact of Britain's Post‐War Trunk Roads Programme

In Great Britain, a basic inter�?urban network of motorways was completed in a very short period between the end of 1959 and 1972. We calculate that this substantial investment had the potential to reduce most inter�?urban journey times by about one third. In spite of this, a recent OECD study suggested that the investment had no discernible positive impact on the trend rate of economic growth. We attribute this outcome to a serious misalignment of the early investments with the then predominant flows of industrial and commercial traffics and a significant, and probably endogenous, increase in real wages in a road transport industry in which labour productivity was slow to improve. We conclude with a number of policy recommendations.