Transportation

Abstract

Public-private partnerships are common in transportation. The most significant are policy partnerships in which the public provides a long-term investment to create the basic infrastructure for a transportation mode. Highways are the most spectacular case of a policy partnership; governments build roads, while private motorists invest in vehicles, fuel, insurance, and so forth. Policy partnerships have also been established in declining transport modes, for example, Amtrak for intercity passenger trains and federal subsidies for urban transit. There are also project-based partnerships in which politicians offer incentives for private capital to invest at specific sites. The goal of such partnerships is often not transportation, but urban redevelopment. As policy shifts toward reducing transportation's negative externalities, new possibilities for public-private partnerships emerge. After decades of wrangling over auto emissions and energy standards, Detroit and Washington created the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) to develop dramatically cleaner and more fuel-efficient automobiles.