There is growing concern around the world about insufficient
capacity and poor condition of transportation infrastructure.
Congestion on roads and at airports, bottlenecks at seaports and
railway terminuses, the dilapidated state of highways and other
problems are evident and mounting. In the European Union,
emphasis has been placed on the development of a Trans-European
Transport Network (TEN-T) to improve economic competitiveness
and social cohesion. The predicted €225 billion cost of the
priority TEN-T projects far outstrips the EU level funding
available.
Traditional revenue sources such as fuel taxes, property
taxes, and intergovernmental transfers are unlikely to suffice
in the future either to pay for adequate maintenance or to fund
necessary investments in new and improved infrastructure.
Shortages of funds, and increasing support for the user pays
principle, are behind calls to give an increased role to direct
user charges such as highway tolls and airport fees.
Increasingly, the private sector is being called upon to help
finance, build and operate infrastructure. The private sector is
often seen as better than the public sector at identifying
attractive investment projects, and able to build infrastructure
more quickly and cheaply. These problems are more pronounced
when the infrastructure serves different states or regions. When
infrastructure use can be priced, there is the risk of monopoly
charges (‘tax exporting’) on transit. When infrastructure use is
too costly to price, the risk is that local infrastructure
investments are congested by transit.
This conference is envisaged as the second of a series of
international conferences on transportation infrastructure
funding and related topics. The first conference took place in
BANFF (Canada) in 2006 and was highly successful with over 60
participants from 14 countries. The conference revealed that
many approaches to financing and funding infrastructure are used
around the world, but that there is, as yet, no unified and
tested theory to guide policy selection.
The Second International Conference on Funding Transportation
Infrastructure will be preceded on September 19th 2007 by the
final conference of the EU research consortium FUNDING (www.econ.kuleuven.be/funding/).
This consortium is currently examining different mechanisms for
funding large transport infrastructure projects using a
combination of earmarked funds and user charges. These have been
applied to a number of TEN-T case studies using advanced cost
benefit analysis techniques for transport network models.
Building on this recent experience, this conference will
focus on the relationship between pricing of transportation
infrastructure and investments. It will consider institutional
mechanisms such as earmarking of revenues, transportation funds,
Public Private Partnerships, and inter-government relationships
that facilitate (or potentially impede) efficient pricing and
investment decisions for transportation infrastructure.
