Cost and Schedule Performance Benchmarks of U.S. Transportation Public-Private Partnership Projects

Abstract

The use of public–private partnerships (PPPs) has steadily increased in the United States since the early 1990s. Infrastructure design and construction projects have seen significant variations in costs and schedules. Therefore this paper aims to quantify the cost and schedule performance of recently completed PPP projects in the U.S. transportation sector and compare them to their non-PPP counterparts. The authors collected and verified data from professional data sets, publicly available websites, and structured interviews with key project constituents. The paper presents results from 25 completed PPP transportation projects. All projects in the data set were completed between 1995 and 2013; project costs ranged from $18 million to $2.1 billion and totaled about $14 billion. The results of the analysis showed an average cost growth of 3.22% and an average schedule growth of 1.2%; when compared with traditional design–bid–build delivery, these findings illustrate superior performance. This paper fills a gap in the knowledge of PPP project performance in the U.S. transportation sector and compares the results with previous research efforts in the international PPP market.