Inflation-adjusted federal funding of transportation projects per vehicle mile of travel has been decreasing for decades. In response, states and regions around the United States have scrambled to make up the shortfalls. In the nation's most populous state, California, the 18-cent per gallon motor fuel excise tax remained unchanged between 1993 and 2016, despite the fact that inflation and increased vehicle fuel efficiency together eroded the fuel tax's buying power (1). Since the 1980s, the growing gap between transportation program needs and revenues has been increasingly backfilled in California (and several other states) by county sales tax measures for transportation. Since 1976, California residents have voted on 76 local option sales taxes (LOSTs) to fund transportation in 30 of the most populous of the state's 58 counties. As of 2017, 24 counties, home to 88% of the state's population (2), have active LOST measures. The most recent measures in these so-called Self Help Counties have been approved by at least two-thirds voter majorities as required by California law. Transportation sales tax measures can produce substantial revenue for the maintenance, operation, and expansion of transportation facilities and services; sales tax revenues dedicated to transportation today produce over US$4 billion per year for transportation construction and maintenance in California (3). Voters in some counties have approved LOST measures as many as five separate times (4). LOSTs for transportation have proven politically popular; voters tend to like them because they fund popular projects via taxes automatically levied in very small increments (often a ½-or 1-cent per dollar) over a very large number of transactions. Because these small levies apply to nearly all consumer purchases, LOSTs generate substantial revenue for transportation. On the other hand, LOSTs are less related to travel than are fuel taxes or tolls, which means that light users of transportation systems tend to pay more per mile in transportation sales than do heavy users (5). Despite LOST's increasing role in transportation finance, there is no comprehensive, up-to-date data source on transportation sales tax measures. Given the labor intensiveness of gathering comparable data on LOST measures, and in particular on what they fund, this research focuses on the most 782757T RRXXX10.
The development of transportation infrastructure requires a long planning, funding, and implementation cycle that often takes more than a decade for a particular project. Environmental mitigation is usually planned and implemented late in this process and on a project-by-project basis. Habitat conservation plans (HCPs), which provide an alternative model, are becoming increasingly popular. HCPs consist of an early assessment of regional mitigation needs and advanced planning for habitat- or landscape-level impacts from multiple infrastructure projects. This approach has potential benefits, which include reduced project delays, lower mitigation and transaction costs, and improved conditions for the affected species. This paper reviews the current status of HCPs and examines their use and place in the infrastructure planning process, as described by HCP developers in a national survey. The review and survey show that this model is growing in popularity and holds promise for further development as an approach to both habitat preservation and infrastructure development.
Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) hold great promise to improve personal and commercial travel, but intelligently linking vehicles and travelers via increasingly interconnected real-time data systems creates a host of new and largely untested liability questions when things go wrong. In this article, we examine current policies, laws, and administrative codes guiding ITS liability by reviewing the scholarly literature and case law in the United States. We find (a) a patchwork of industry self-regulation, (b) a modicum of tort case law precedent that varies substantially across states, (c) many unresolved questions, and (d) little prospect of guiding federal legislation on the horizon. While the liability questions raised by driverless cars have received much attention, we conclude that ITS liability standards are likely to be settled incrementally in the near term on decidedly narrow grounds via case law on navigation and collision-avoidance systems, long before fully automated vehicles are deployed.
Advance mitigation is a process through which the environmental impacts and required mitigation are assessed for one or more transportation projects early in project planning and development. The approach enables mitigation to be planned, commenced, and completed earlier; applies regionally or programmatically across multiple projects; and takes ecosystem- and landscape-level concerns into account. Although there have been efforts to develop programmatic mitigation initiatives and funding to support them, there is little documentation of their establishment, operation, or accomplishments. A study documents and analyzes 10 prominent California experiences with advance mitigation undertaken by the state department of transportation in coordination with regional councils, local governments and transportation agencies, and environmental groups. Each effort is profiled, including the origin of the mitigation effort; its location, scale, and cost; its specific connection to transportation projects; funding, revenue sources, or financial options used to support it; key institutional partners; and lessons learned from the experience. California's initiatives offer some lessons: external conservation planning efforts can play a significant role in creating both momentum and structure for comprehensive mitigation planning; transportation-related advance mitigation is necessarily a highly interdependent undertaking, involving not only the state department of transportation and other transportation project sponsors but also federal and state natural resource agencies as well as local environmental groups; and the long-time horizons of advance mitigation planning and the complex nature of infrastructure development bring unavoidable uncertainty to such efforts and demand flexibility from mitigation partners in the process.
What’s a fair way to pay for urban transportation? Local option sales taxes (LOSTs) for transportation are an increasingly common mechanism for locally financing transportation in the context of declining federal and state funding. LOSTs are typically regressive, raising equity concerns. But their fairness also depends on who benefits from them, based on which projects are funded, where projects are located, and when investments occur. We examine how perceptions of these four dimensions of equity (income, geographic, temporal, and modal) are represented and debated in the ballot arguments for 38 LOST elections in California. We find that measure supporters use subtle language to imply that proposed expenditure plans achieve equity on all dimensions, promising “something for everyone.” Measure opponents, by contrast, typically attack specific perceived inequities in proposed expenditure plans. We find that tradeoffs among types of equity debated in ballot arguments frame winners and losers across multiple equity dimensions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.