Procuring, Valuing, and Financing Transportation Infrastructure

The work plan has six distinct parts: (1) assembling a publicly available infrastructure cost data; (2) purchasing a second data set from a private provider; (3) organizing two conferences – one virtual, one in person -- on infrastructure procurement; (4) organizing two conferences on project selection and cost-benefit analysis; (5) organizing a conference and creating an edited volume on financing infrastructure; and (6) managing a continuing process of engagement with practitioners that involves both long-term relationships and a short term strategy for knowledge dissemination when the research has been done.
The data assembly work, managed by Slattery, will build on recommendations from the Procurement Data Working Group that was supported by a Sloan Foundation planning grant (G-2023-19662). This group included Glaeser, Slattery, Liscow, Adriano Fernandes, Shoshana Lew and Steve Poftak. This group will continue to provide advice on the data collection initiative and will participate in both of the infrastructure procurement meetings that are proposed as part of this project. David Ullman, Assistant Secretary of Transportation for New York State, has agreed to joint this group.
The two conferences on improved cost-benefit analysis will be organized by Stephen Redding, possibly in tandem with other researchers who are working on related issues. One will focus on the effect of infrastructure on the geographic allocation of economic activity; it will be held in 2025. The other, on accounting for spatial spillovers when evaluating transportation projects, will take place in early 2027.
The conference on financing transportation infrastructure will be co-organized by Glaeser, Poterba, and Vasserman and will take place in late 2026. The organizers will commission a set of eight papers on options for financing transportation infrastructure, with attention to efficiency consequences, distributional impacts, and revenue-raising potential. The research papers will be collected in an edited proceedings volume for potential publication by the University of Chicago Press.