Recently in Transportation Category

Source: By Caitlin Devitt, Bond Buyer, Wednesday, September 1, 2010

A month after winning city and county approval to sell its water and sewer system, Indianapolis stands poised to enter into a 50-year lease of its parking meters in exchange for cash and a piece of the annual parking revenue.

It's the latest effort by Mayor Greg Ballard to raise money for infrastructure projects without raising property taxes.

Source: South Pittsburgh Reporter, August 2010

Last week, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl announced the city had released the final request for proposals (RFP) for seven pre-qualified investors to submit a final proposal on the monetizing the city's parking assets.

Following a public process, including several neighborhood public meetings, the mayor proposed changes from the draft that addresses some of the public's concerns and ensures the city still receives a significant upfront payment that will prevent a state takeover of its pension fund.

Source: By DAN MIHALOPOULOS and MICK DUMKE, Chicago News Scoop (IL)
July 29, 2010

..... The deal with the city allows the company to raise meter rates by an average of 20 percent next year, 17 percent in 2012 and 14 percent in 2013, with increases beyond that year to be based on inflation. Those increases are expected to lift revenues to almost $162 million a year in 2020, the Standard & Poor's analysts estimated.

Source:
Rick Orlov, Contra Costa Times (CA) 08/10/2010

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation wasted $855,000 and went over budget by nearly $2.5 million on a contract to equip parking enforcement vehicles with GPS systems, City Controller Wendy Greuel said Tuesday.

A new audit found that Transportation Department officials failed to properly oversee the $1.5 million contract with Integrated System Resources. As a result, the company eventually received $4 million.

Source: Yonah Freemark, Transport Politic,  August 3rd, 2010

For investors interested in infrastructure projects these days, there is apparently a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick. This, at least, is the argument made by Montréal-based contractor and engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, which has pulled out of a years-long commitment to operating Toronto's planned airport connection train because the regional transportation authority refused to subsidize the service.

Source: By James Pilcher, Enquirer (OH), July 20, 2010

Backed by the nation's largest transit unions, a fired bus driver from Oakland, Calif. Tuesday filed a class action lawsuit against downtown Cincinnati-based First Transit, saying the transit company's policy barring individuals with felony convictions is discriminatory against blacks and Hispanics and violates long-standing civil rights laws.

Experts say that the case could change hiring practices for all companies nationally whoever prevails, and could set major labor law precedent.

..... First Transit is a subsidiary of downtown-based First Group America, the nation's largest private provider of transit services for public city bus systems as well as public and private school districts, and also owns Greyhound Bus Lines.

...... The Amalgamated Transit Union says that the policy violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which states that employers can't base hiring on a past felony conviction if it would disproportionately impact minority groups.

Source:  Bond Buyer, Thursday, July 8, 2010 By Patrick Temple-West

Investors and the state of South Carolina are haggling over who will get a bigger share of revenue from a bankrupt bond-funded toll road.

Owners of $200 million of senior and subordinate bonds issued in 1998 by the Connector 2000 Association Inc. for the toll road outside Greenville say they should have precedence. But the state Department of Transportation says it wants more of the cash to help pay for maintenance of the road.

.... Under the license agreement, the state is obligated to maintain the highway but revenues have not been sufficient to reimburse the DOT. Those upkeep costs have put the state at odds with bondholders, who claim to be owed $369 million, including accreted interest, according to bankruptcy documents.

Source: By GLEN JOHNSON, The Associated Press (MA)  June 21, 2010, 12:15PM

Transportation officials are examining how much money Massachusetts might save if they have state employees do more highway snow removal instead of the current patchwork of private contractors.

Transportation Secretary Jeffrey Mullan said Monday the $57.5 million the state is preparing to spend this coming winter is ripe for scrutiny because it's one of his bigger budget line items. And that figure is below historical averages: Massachusetts spent $66 million for plowing last winter and has spent an average of $76 million annually during the past five years.

Source: By Bill Bush, THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH (OH), Tuesday, June 8, 2010  11:19 PM

Like a stubborn foreman with a hung jury, Columbus school board President Carol Perkins pushed her colleagues tonight to debate the details of a $14.2 million-a-year bus contract again and again.

..... That means First Student - the company that shut down the district for a day in 2007 after one of its drivers was caught with a cocaine-filled syringe - will be the sole private bus contractor for the district until 2013.

The company will not let the district down, said Roger Moore, First Student regional vice president, after winning the three-year contract on the 4-3 vote.

Source: Peter F. Swan and Michael H. Belzer, Public Works Management & Policy 2010 14: 351-373

Little scholarly empirical work measures truckers' elasticity of demand for limited access toll roads. How do truckers respond to pricing signals? As price increases, how extensively do truckers divert from limited-access highways to secondary roads? At what price does this diversion impose costs on secondary highways? Using a unique data set, this article demonstrates empirically the extent to which pricing leads to diversion. Diversion is substantial, and elasticity becomes increasingly negative with higher tolls. This has significant policy implications. The diversion of large trucks probably creates an externality that, if it were priced, might cause the benefits of tolling to outweigh the costs. This diversion may have a safety cost because secondary roads are inherently less safe than limited-access divided highways. In addition, second-best truck routings may introduce costly deadweight losses to the economy, damaging interstate commerce. Profit-maximizing toll road operators might exacerbate this diversion to the detriment of public welfare.