Supply Chain Policy Center Research Topics

Current Research Topics

Infrastructure Finance

Meeting future freight transport demands will require significant investment in new capacity, yet the availability of funds from traditional sources such as motor fuel taxes is on the decline. The goal in this project is to investigate alternate finance mechanisms such as direct user fees, general tax revenues, general obligation bonds, and public private partnerships, evaluating their ability to raise sufficient revenues, their financial effects on different stakeholder groups, and their political feasibility.

Potential Research Topics

Mitigating Highway Congestion

The continued growth in highway congestion leads to significant costs (in time and money) not just for the traveling public, but for the trucking industry as well. The goal in this project is to evaluate alternative strategies for mitigating highway congestion, focusing on factors such as financial and political feasibility as well as the distribution of costs and benefits for the trucking industry as well as other stakeholders. Potential options might include various forms of road pricing such as congestion tolls, the expansion of general purpose highway lanes, or the development of truck-only toll lanes.

Capacity Expansion with Environmental Mitigation

Community groups, concerned with deteriorating air quality and related health issues, are mounting increasingly effective opposition to planned freight transportation expansion projects. To overcome such challenges, it will likely be necessary to adopt mitigation strategies as part of any future expansion efforts. The goal in this project would be to evaluate alternative policies to achieve necessary air-quality improvements, ranging from command-and-control strategies for new technologies to emissions taxes to cap-and-trade systems. The analysis would include factors such as the relative effectiveness in meeting emissions reduction targets, the cost-efficiency in reducing emissions, and the distribution of costs and benefits among different stakeholders.

Benefits of Public Investment

There can be public benefits to investments that improve freight transport capabilities either through spurring economic growth or by reducing the public costs of freight transportation. Such costs can include passenger transportation congestion and environmental impacts. However, the public benefits of freight transportation-oriented projects are not well understood. This would project would aim to quantify these benefits to build broader support for infrastructure investment projects that would create a positive economic return—for the general public—on the use of public funds.