Abstract:
The present highway funding system, especially fuel taxes, may become less
reliable revenue sources in the future, while the transportation public agencies do
not have the sufficient financial resources needed to meet the increasing traffic
demand. Regarding the socio-economic impact of road privatization, a wide range
of approaches and models have been proposed, but few studies have been devoted
to the detailed analysis of the ownership structure and its resulting
socio-economic outcome. The thesis describes findings based on the economic
impact of specific composition between centralized and decentralized ownership
structures. Specifically, in a centralized ownership model, the government
agencies are responsible for all the ownership activities. In a decentralized
ownership structure, the ownership is distributed to separate parties of interest.
The thesis examines the efficiency of the application of the proposed
transportation model to highway planning with cost-benefit analysis approaches.
Based on a quantitative analytical method, a number of insights are provided
about impacts of ownership structures on the socio-economic performance in
transportation systems. Moreover, the paper discusses how the ownership
structure could be optimized in order to achieve the best economic well-being for
the society.
The comprehensive computational results show that the proposed model and the
approach can analyze and evaluate the socio-economic performance of PPPs
projects. As a result, the proposed model and approach can be used in long-run
prediction of economic performance intended for describing a general
methodology for transportation planning in a large network.
