Transportation Infrastructure Planning, Management, and Finance

Abstract

Participants at the business meeting of the Special Interest Group 5—Transportation Infrastructure Systems—of the World Conference on Transport Research Society WCTRS that took place in Berkeley, Calif., in June of 2007, suggested that we invite authors who presented papers at the conference to submit their work for a special issue of the Journal of Infrastructure Systems. With support from the journal’s editor-in-chief, Samer Madanat, we therefore set out to edit a special issue that would: 1. Highlight relevant to the Journal’s readership and interesting work that was presented at the 11th World Conference on Transport Research, and to disseminate it in archival form; 2. Showcase diverse research being conducted around the world at different types of institutions; and finally, 3. Contribute to the international exposure and growth of the Journal. Authors received our invitations enthusiastically, and ultimately we received 10 manuscripts from researchers located in six countries. Seven of these 10 papers are included in the current special issue. We feel that not only are the papers representative of research taking place around the world, but significantly, that they are representative of emerging research areas relevant to the Journal’s readership, and which have not yet appeared in the Journal extensively. In particular, five of the seven papers constitute applied economics studies related to assessment, financing, and evaluation of investments in transport infrastructure. The other two papers document the development of state-of-the-art tools to improve the management and operation of infrastructure, and thus are closely-tied to work appearing frequently in the Journal. Since we started working at this special issue shortly after the most recent WCTR in 2007, the transport sector has undergone dramatic changes as a consequence of the global economic crises. In 2007 capacity shortage at major international and transnational infrastructures was one of the dominating issues in transport policy. Now we face a period of massive overcapacities in all freight transport systems, causing severe economic problems to major shipping and vehicle manufacturing industries. While no one can give reliable forecasts for when and how the major global