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Public-private partnership (PPP) renegotiations and their outcomes have been studied extensively in Latin America and Europe but not in the United States. Therefore, this study evaluates factors triggering U.S. PPP renegotiations by examining six highway PPPs located in California (2), Indiana (1), and Virginia (3). The findings suggest exogenous macroeconomic shocks, project and political complexity, and institutional inexperience are the most compelling triggers behind U.S. PPP renegotiations. These findings also highlight America's distinct political and institutional environment – i.e. favourable to buy-outs as well as debt restructuring via bankruptcy – as a possible explanation for the absence of opportunism among U.S. PPP renegotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight" by Nicholas Dagen Bloom explores the decline of transit in America. The author dismisses the streetcar conspiracy theory and instead identifies three major factors contributing to the decline: austerity, auto-centric planning, and white flight. Bloom provides detailed case studies of cities and their transit systems, highlighting the impact of these factors. The book also delves into the racial dynamics of transit and its connection to civil rights. However, it does not offer much discussion on current challenges and opportunities in the field of transportation. [Extracted from the article]

The element of uncertainty about future conditions should be considered in urban transportation planning to prevent the creation of large and permanent facilities which may constrain future planning. Flexibility and information gathering should be the guiding principles when uncertainties about social, economic, environmental and technological conditions are great. Designs which achieve long-term economies of scale should be used only when uncertainty about the same conditions are modest. The impact of poor uncertainty representation in urban transportation planning and areas for further research are discussed.

Traditional infrastruture evaluation focuses primarily on technical criteria, such as the comppletion of a designated, interconnected system of facilities or a particular project's capacity to reduce costs borne by suppliers [...]

The technological development of airports and the air transportation system in general can be attained via functional refinement and functional discovery. Functional refinement is concerned with the enhancement of existing features while functional discovery deals with the creation of new technological functions and forms. Functional refinement may be readjusted to encourage functional discovery but adopting functional refinement efforts that disregard functional discovery runs counter to social desire for specialized and flexible production.

Byline: Jonathan L. Gifford, Odd J. Stalebrink Standards for intelligent transportation system (ITS) equipment have been called for since the outset of the current ITS movement more than a decade ago. But progress towards standardisation has been slow. This paper provides an overview of three 'conventional' approaches to standardisation - de facto standards, standards development organisations (SDOs) and regulatory standards. In the light of these approaches, it examines the contributions of a consortium approach to standardisation by presenting and analysing six case studies of consortia-based standards, both in ITS and in other sectors. The analysis brings attention to: (a) instances where the cases illustrate the flexibility offered by a consortium; (b) instances where a consortium has led to speedy standardisation; and (c) conditions under which (a) and (b) are most successfully facilitated by consortia. It is concluded that a consortium approach to standardisation may be useful to ITS standardisation when the following three conditions are present in the domains of ITS rapid technology cycle, dynamic market, and strong mutual interest.

The limited understanding of public–private partnerships (P3s) for transportation infrastructure finance has been generally attributed to a lack of data. The more fundamental question of how P3 data are utilized in the literature is more relevant and critical, but remains unclear. This study investigates this question by examining the linkages between research objectives and data characteristics through a meta-analysis of infrastructure P3 studies using multinomial regressions. It analyzes 95 empirical studies that adopt actual data, selected from a P3 research database that includes over 345 studies and are classified into five categories including performance, contract, risk, value for money, and institutional factors. Results show that the case studies are less frequently utilized to understand P3s' institutional issues compared to those that focus on P3s' performance or VFM. Survey data are more frequently used to study P3 contracts rather than issues related to P3 project risk. We highlight the need for policy-makers to require continuing disclosure of P3 performance for validating the effectiveness of the procurement model and to improve the practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]