Essam A Sharaf

Indiana State Highway Reciprocity Study

The report evaluates the fiscal impact of Indianas joining the International Registration Plan (IRP). The analysis involved both the revenue impact and the impact on the trucking industry. The major finding of the study is that there would be little revenue gain if Indiana joined IRP without a truck tax restructuring, and possibly a loss if only Indiana miles are counted in base-mile ratio computation. In order to assess the fiscal impact of Indianas joining IRP, the net effect of two revenue streams was considered. First, an estimate was made of how much of the current registration revenue collected by Indiana from its resident interstate carriers with vehicles of 26,000 lb. or more will be lost due to IRP. Then the expected registration revenue from carriers based in the current IRP member jurisdictions who operate in Indiana was estimated. The estimation of fees related to the resident carriers was done on the basis of information gathered through a random sample survey of the carriers. A statistically sampled mail survey was sent to 3,170 of Indianas home-based carriers, stratified by fleet size. A 29.3% response rate provided statistically reliable information on truck type and mileage of Indiana operators. In order to estimate incoming revenue from out-of-state carriers under the IRP, data from several state records were used. These primarily included the motor fuel use tax records and indefinite situs tax records. In addition, the IRP recap data for nine states from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators and data from several other jurisdictions were used.

ENERGY CONSERVATION AND COST SAVINGS RELATED TO HIGHWAY ROUTINE MAINTENANCE. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This research was conducted in three phases. The first two phases were presented in two interim reports. This report includes a summary of the first two phases and a detailed discussion of the final phase. The final phase of the study focused on a trend analysis of energy use in routine maintenance and development of an optimization approach that can be used to determine the optimal assignment of various equipment types to different activities. The use of the approach was illustrated through an example application. A set of energy conservation guidelines was then outlined for possible implementation.