Abstract
Welcome to 2024! Another year of Public Works Management and Policy will continue to bring you articles on the cutting edge of research and practice at the intersection of infrastructure and public policy and administration.
First off, Ghahari, et al., address the troubling issue of corruption in infrastructure development in “Corruption Propensity and Mitigation at Different Phases of Infrastructure Development.” The existing literature on corruption does not address the issue from an infrastructure life cycle perspective and the objective of this paper is to identify opportunities at each phase of the infrastructure life cycle where stakeholders and actors can help undertake specific actions to mitigate corruption. The paper’s methodology characterizes corruption and mitigation measures in a framework based on the phases of the infrastructure development life cycle and then connects these measures to the relevant actors and stakeholders.
Next up, is a study of 85 coastal counties in the southeastern United States and how they are planning to deal with sea level rise (SLR). In “Treading Water: Planning for Sea Level Rise in the Southeastern United States, Grandage, Hines, and Willoughby find that most are in the early stages of planning for SLR, having recognized it as a general threat to their communities but that relatively few have done a formal analysis of risk across their portfolio of infrastructure assets and service obligations. Strong information gathering on the part of local governments contributes to more completely documented risks and their results indicate that robust risk management can help achieve an important objective of adaptive governance – understanding climate threats and developing feasible solutions to live with them at the local level.
At a more focused local level, Stich and Mallum assess New Orleans’ Adopt-A-Catch Basin Program; the city’s first experiment that puts democratic concepts into practice concerning water management. “The New Orleans Adopt-A-Catch Basin Program and Citizen Involvement” examines the adoption of co-production of services between the city and its citizens and analyzes how efficient the program has been in solving the city’s perennial challenges of street flooding. They found that the primary issues negatively affecting the program’s success include ineffective communication, recruitment, risks, liability, and distrust of government; all issues that call for proactive stakeholder involvement to achieve better synergy between government and the people.
Although autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are widely considered to be the future of surface transportation in the United States, little is understood about how people will interact with these vehicles, what they will use them for, and how they will impact our roads. Because this is a nascent technology, most of the existing literature on the topic deals with the perceptions of potential users rather than actual experience. In “How Prior Experience with Automated Technology Impacts Perceptions of Autonomous Vehicles Among Midwestern U.S. Farmers,” Hazelton-Boyle and Piatkowski report on their interviews with farmers who have been interacting with farm machinery that uses auto-guidance technology for at least a decade. Their findings include many implications for on-road AVs that could affect technology, infrastructure, and users, that are relevant for engineers, planners, and policy-makers seeking to be proactive in preparing for a future of AVs.
The final paper in this issue evaluates a congestion management concept based on the conversion of existing general-purpose freeway lanes to priced lanes offering free access for high-occupancy vehicles, in conjunction with cash payments to incentivize commuters to travel as passengers in transit, carpools or vanpools. DeCorley-Souza and Minett use model the viability of the concept on the eastern segment of the Capital Beltway in the Washington, DC metro area and report their findings in “Relieving Traffic Congestion and Accommodating Travel Growth without Expanding Highways: A Policy Evaluation for the Eastern Segment of the Capital Beltway.” The proposal could benefit both users of shared travel modes and toll-payers, improve travel speeds on toll-free general-purpose lanes, and generate significant surplus revenues to support capital investments and operating subsidies for shared travel modes.
The issue closes with a review by Richard Little, Editor of PWMP of “How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between” by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner.