Richard G. Little

Protecting the Public Interest: Role of Long-Term Concession Agreements for Providing Transportation Infrastructure

Lack of cash has led virtually every state in the United States to explore innovative finance techniques that allow important improvement projects to move forward while keeping taxes and fees low. Many observers have hailed long-term concession agreements as the long-awaited silver bullet to solve the transportation funding crisis, but others have raised concerns about these deals. How are public-sector decision makers to know whether they are advancing the public interest when they consider these agreements? The concession approach has many advantages over traditional methods, but there are many concerns with these nontraditional techniques. At this point, very few people have a complete picture of the short- and long-term implications of different approaches and associated trade-offs. Some of the public concerns include facility undervaluation, use of upfront payments, length of concession, and noncompete clauses, among others. Many of the concerns with long-term concessions are legacies from the past that have been rectified as both the public and private sectors have learned and adapted. This paper summarizes public concerns related to long-term concessions, describes recent trends in how governments have evolved to respond to public reaction, and suggests key issues that need to be considered in the future.

Tending the infrastructure commons: Ensuring the sustainability of our vital public systems

It is by now well recognized that civil infrastructure systems are essential in providing the range of services generally considered necessary to support a nations economic well-being and quality of life. Consequently, it is of the utmost importance to government, business, and the general populace that these services are sustained over the long term by periodic replenishment of the physical systems that deliver them. This has proven challenging for several reasons. First, civil infrastructures do not all lie within the public domain. Second, infrastructures are complex systems that are vulnerable to failures or service degradations in other systems because of their interconnected and interdependent natures. Third, despite the obvious importance of reliable and resilient systems to our collective social, economic, and political well-being, it has been difficult to fund the necessary maintenance and capital improvements. Deciding what levels of reliability should be provided and who should pay for it are not simple questions to be addressed solely by service providers, customers, or government regulators. This paper will present the concept of an infrastructure commons and recommend some initial actions that the federal government could take to ensure that the national ‘public good’ aspect of civil is preserved and enhanced. These actions include the beginning of an informed and serious dialogue between the public and private sectors, building coalitions for action among stakeholders in the governance process, and exploring alternative mechanisms for ensuring dependable and sustainable resource streams.

The impact of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on tourism in Thailand

The 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami appears to have reduced tourist visits to southern Thailand and particularly to the provinces of Phuket and Phang Nga. In Thailand, a much higher proportion of the tsunami victims were tourists than in other affected nations. Also, the tourism industry, which is a major source of foreign exchange, is very sensitive to the perception of risk created by disasters like this tsunami. Although revenues may remain depressed for some time, it is likely that tourism will rebound in this region because of the attractiveness of the physical amenity and the value it offers for European tourists. Damage to the physical infrastructure did not serve as a substantial impediment to response and recovery. Information and warning systems, together with buildings that afford vertical evacuation, will protect lives and reduce perceived risk.

The Emerging Role of Public–Private Partnerships in Megaproject Delivery

As civil infrastructure projects have grown in scale and scope, their cost has increased accordingly. As a result, we have entered what has been termed the era of the infrastructure megaproject; those that typically cost more than US

Rethinking Flood Protection Options and Opportunities for New Orleans

1 billion (oftentimes much more) and also have major impacts on communities, the environment, and public finance. Although constructed works of enormous cost and impact have existed since ancient times and have often been financed by the private sector, what distinguishes the modern megaproject is its unfortunate association with huge delays in delivery time and large cost overruns. This article examines some of the reasons why megaprojects have become synonymous with poor cost and schedule performance and suggests that innovative project delivery methods, broadly termed public—private partnerships (PPP or P3), have the potential to improve project performance by better integration of the project delivery organization in the allocation and management of risk.

Socio-Technological Systems Integration to Support Tsunami Warning and Evacuation

Flood protection is often presumed to be a public good and hence a government responsibility. Unfortunately, the full costs of publicly-funded flood control efforts are often obscured. Moreover, reliance on government protection can create false impressions that individual risks have been minimized, thus encouraging more personal and business investment in disaster-prone regions. Reimbursing these losses after a disaster perpetuates a cycle in which resources spent to protect communities from flood damage can instead increase vulnerability and create a climate of “moral hazard” where people fail to take appropriate actions to reduce risk. As New Orleans continues to rebuild from the damage of Hurricane Katrina, there is a need to consider comprehensive approaches that will provide decision makers at all levels with incentives to manage flood risk more effectively. This paper offers guidance for developing more rational, risk-based government policies for flood protection, approaches that could be less costly and place fewer people and their livelihoods at risk.

Toward a National Strategic Investment Framework

On December 26, 2004, countries in the Indian Ocean basin were struck by a tsunami generated by a large magnitude earthquake just south of the western tip of Sumatra. Observations made during a post-tsunami visit to coastal Thailand suggest that the value of the proposed emergency warning system (EWS) for the Indian Ocean would be greatly enhanced if it was augmented by an on-shore cyber-based warning and evacuation system. Such a system would greatly increase safety with minimal disruption to the normal activities involved in tourism and other coastal industries. An integrated, cyber-based system to inform and assist the tsunami detection, warning, and evacuation process would, in essence, expand time and shorten distances. This paper describes the elements of such a cyber-infrastructure system, how system triggers could be calibrated using decision principles from judgment theory, and how the system could be tested through simulations employing agent-based models

Using Regional Economic Models to Estimate the Costs of Infrastructure Failures: The Cost of a Limited Interruption in Electric Power in the Los Angeles Region

America is entering a tumultuous period unrivaled in recent history. We are facing a disruption of our economy only rivaled by the Great Depression. We need to come to grips with our reliance on foreign oil that is at the heart of our national security problems. We are confronted with the challenge of global survival because of climate change. Finally, our economic growth over the past several decades has left many in America behind. These were the key issues in the recent presidential election, which was essentially an 18-month national visioning process that established societal goals of reducing CO2, decreasing dependence on imported oil, and increasing economic well-being for all Americans. The goals established through this extensive national debate and election started a transformation process that will enable America to overcome the enormous challenges we face and initiate an investment program that will continue for decades and through this century. The societal goals, articulated in broad scope, must now be translated by the President and Congress into explicit performance standards and policy directives, which will, in turn, be applied within each of the nation’s megaregions to create a “Strategic Investment Framework” to meet the national vision and goals. Our global competitors are keenly focused on how to envision and build this new 21st-century society. We must do the same.

Building the Right Tool for the Job: Value of Stakeholder Involvement When Developing Decision-Support Technologies for Emergency Management

An integrated model of losses caused by infrastructure failures is presented together with an example application to interruptions in electric power. The model estimates how these losses affect the metropolitan economy. This measurement accounts for direct, indirect, and induced costs that can result from infrastructure failures. The procedure advances the information provided by transportation and activity system analysis techniques in ways that help capture the most important economic implications of infrastructure failures. Transportation network costs and origin-destination requirements are modeled endogenously and consistently. The overall research framework permits these full costs to be expressed in aggregate terms at a submetropolitan level as well as in a distributional sense.

Toward a New Federal Role in Infrastructure Investment: Using U.S. Sovereign Wealth to Rebuild America

AbstractComputer-aided simulation and decision-support tools have a recognized role in planning for, and responding to, extreme hazard events. Multi-network interdependent critical infrastructure program for the analysis of lifelines (MUNICIPAL) is a multipurpose computer-simulation and decision-support tool that was developed to simulate the damage to interdependent critical infrastructure systems during extreme weather events and to guide their restoration following such events. This paper describes the interactive stakeholder-involvement process that was used during the development of MUNICIPAL to increase the likelihood that it would become a useful aid to planners and policymakers, emergency managers, and infrastructure service providers. It demonstrates that a structured process for obtaining input from the user community throughout the process can increase the likelihood that tools such as MUNICIPAL will be adopted for training, awareness raising, and team building among the diverse public and priv...