Infra Insight Blog

At the TRB P3 Subcommittee meeting on January 12, 2015, among the topics discussed is the growth in the U.S. P3 market of the availability payment approach and less use of toll concessions.  Availability payment contracts have the advantage of lowering financing costs, incentivizing high quality performance and keeping toll setting authority with the public owner.  However, there may be a limit to the amount of annual payments a public agency is willing to commit itself to make.  Toll concessions shift demand and revenue risk to the private sector and interest particularly among ...

The Transportation Research Board of the National Academies (TRB) has released its second volume of guidance addressing risks in project delivery, including risks associated with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).  This second volume of guidance, entitled Guidance for Managing NEPA-Related and Other Risks in Project Delivery, Volume 2: Expediting NEPA Decisions and Other Practitioner Strategies for Addressing High Risk Issues in Project Delivery, (Volume 2) was submitted in March 2014 under the TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) and ...

The Transportation Research Board’s (TRB) 5th annual International Conference on Financing Surface Transportation will be held from July 9-11, 2014 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, CA.

The conference will examine the current status of transportation finance and future possibilities through thought-provoking program offerings with presenters from the fields of transportation research, government, and the private sector.

Conference sessions include:

• Innovation, Experimentation and Exploration – The Landscape of Transportation Funding and Finance ...

State agencies have increasingly turned to alternative contracting methods such as design-build and public-private partnerships to deliver highway construction projects.  As a result, the use of performance-based specifications has also increased.

To provide a better understanding of how these specifications function, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) recently released Legal Research Digest 61, which provides an overview of performance-based specifications, explores how they differ from traditional design or method-based specifications, and explains the ...

For the 89^th year, January brings new ideas in transportation. The 89^th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting will be held in Washington D.C., January 10-14. 

Reflecting the theme of Investing in Our Transportation Future – BOLD Ideas to Meet BIG Challenges, Nossaman Partner Geoffrey Yarema will give a presentation titled "P3 Successes and Lessons Learned" on January 10. Nossaman Partner Nancy Smith will give a presentation titled "Public-Private Partnership Update" on January 11. 

We look forward to discussing and learning with others.

TRB’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) division has weighed in on road user fees based on vehicle miles traveled or VMT. Their latest report Implementable Strategies for Shifting to Direct Usage-Based Charges for Transportation Funding responds to VMT’s critics who say the transportation funding method would be too challenging and require a lengthy implementation period. The report outlines strategies for shifting to direct user-based charges for transportation funding, focusing on incremental VMT mechanisms which can be fully implemented in the ...