Summit and Events
What is Private Investment in Transport Infrastructure and Why is it Difficult?
Discussion Paper, Policy Insights,
28 January 2019
- Distinguish between infrastructure and the operations that take place on it.
- To pursue private investment in infrastructure, choose between competition for the contract or the regulated model.
- Differentiate between attracting private investors in existing assets (privatisation) and in new infrastructure PPPs.
Policies to Extend the Life of Road Assets
Research Report, Policy Insights,
20 December 2018
- Introduce a proactive approach for the maintenance of road assets.
- Build a proactive, data-driven approach to the maintenance of road assets.
- Strive for continuous professionalisation in road asset management.
- Move from managing the assets to cross-asset management.
- Adopt regulatory frameworks that treat the use of road assets as an economic input.
- Implement infrastructure pricing for trucks to improve cost recovery.
- Better understand the reasons for non-compliance with truck weight limits.
- Focus on positive incentives for efficiency in regulatory and compliance frameworks.
- Develop use cases and business models for the digital infrastructure of truck traffic management.
- Create incentives for the logistics sector to implement truck traffic management.
- Improve awareness of the mutual impact that policies have on the environmental performance of road freight transport and extending the lifespan of road assets.
- Focus on creating a comprehensive regulatory environment rather than on individual measures.
Regulatory Capacity Building
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
8 November 2018
- Favour the use of confidential contracts.
- Consider the use of arbitration.
- Reinforce legal capacity.
- Develop financial accounting and reporting requirements.
- Consider adapting the standard North American financial reporting form for Mexico.
- Develop a standard waybill.
- Develop a waybill sample data collection and analysis system.
- Determine the structure of the waybill sample.
- Choose a contractor to process waybills.
- Establish a network modelling process to generate traffic flow analyses.
Inland transport infrastructure investment in OECD remains stable at 0.7% of GDP
Statistics Brief,
19 August 2018
Private Investment in Transport Infrastructure: Dealing with Uncertainty in Contracts
Research Report, Policy Insights,
21 June 2018
- Pursue private investment in infrastructure on the merits of improved efficiency.
- Invest more into upfront preparation of projects to reduce inefficient risk pricing by suppliers.
- Undertake a comprehensive analysis of how to assist suppliers.
- The pursuit of certainty in delivery should be balanced against cost.
- Stimulate innovation through early contractor involvement or alliancing, not public-private partnerships.
- Avoid transferring demand risk to public-private partnerships if service levels do not strongly impact demand.
- Bundle and cross-fund public-private partnerships to reduce demand risk.
- Adopt the regulatory asset base model where competition is absent or demand not strongly endogenous.
- Introduce a transparent public accounting standard to maximise the value for money of private investment.
- Foster competitive markets to achieve cost-effective infrastructure.
- Pursue data collection on how contract design affects project outcomes.
- Support the development of an evidence-supported procurement tool.
Cooperative Mobility Systems and Automated Driving
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
2 May 2018
- Shared mobility is still a relatively new field but is progressing rapidly. With business models and preferred technologies still in flux, policy makers need to prepare considered responses to these developments without delay.
- Service concepts and technology currently and on the brink of being explored need to consider a range of design domain restrictions, dependencies on infrastructure, operating principles and user interfaces.
- Specific service concepts should be matched to specific operational environments, on a detailed local level as well as across continents and cultures.
- Government action will affect how automated vehicles will impact society. Existing approaches will not be appropriate for long. Their understanding and input will help to balance the debate on whether AVs can indeed alleviate a series of stubborn problems.
Integrating Urban Public Transport Systems and Cycling
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
25 April 2018
- Design interchange stations to provide secure, uncongested conditions for transfer by the shortest routes possible.
- Provide adequate bike parking areas at stations and stops.
- Integrate ticketing and information systems as well as the physical transport infrastructure.
- Establish integrated urban transport plans in consultation with stakeholders and the public.
L'évaluation ex-post des investissements et interventions publiques dans les transports
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
27 November 2017
- Planifier d’emblée la collecte des données nécessaires à l’évaluation.
- Procéder à un exercice de vérification en cours d’exécution.
- Confier l’exercice de vérification à des entités indépendantes.
- Reconnaître la diversité des objectifs économiques des investissements dans les transports.
- Associer les partenaires locaux en démontrant l’efficacité du projet.
Capacity Building through Efficient Use of Existing Airport Infrastructure
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
30 October 2017
- Whilst governments should act cautiously and avoid intervention unless there are strong reasons for it, airports, airlines, air navigation service providers, and regulators need to pursue all possible technical innovations to improve the utilisation of airport capacity. Collaborative decision-making is critical to achieving optimal outcomes.
- Governments should consider policies improving air connectivity alongside all impacts of air transport, in particular in terms of noise and air pollution impacts on local communities.
- Governments should constantly re-evaluate caps on aircraft movements that are designed to contain noise impacts, as technological improvements make it possible to reduce noise nuisance while allowing for more aircraft operations.
- IATA WSG should continue to evolve to facilitate more efficient use of scarce airport capacity, ultimately benefitting passengers and other users of aviation. Authorities should ensure that the rules are applied in practice as intended.
- Any system of slot allocation at congested airports needs to take account of the potential benefits of competition. When slots are allocated to new entrants they should be in sufficient quantity to support viable business models.
- The potential to use primary slot auctioning to improve welfare outcomes at congested airports should not be ruled out. To make decisions on primary slot auctioning, the transfer of rents needs to be considered explicitly, and steps taken to avoid excessive disruption to incumbent airlines.
- Secondary slot trading should be allowed and facilitated for more efficient utilisation of capacity.
- Congested airports should eliminate price discrimination against large aircraft wherever such discrimination is present.
Mesurer les avantages socio-économiques des transports
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
1 October 2017
- Les directives relatives à l’ACA peuvent être élargies pour prendre en compte la fiabilité et certains effets plus larges.
- Des travaux de recherche supplémentaires sont nécessaires sur les avantages en matière de fiabilité afin d’améliorer la confiance dans les résultats.
- Les effets économiques plus larges devraient être étudiés dans les cas où l’on s’attend à ce qu’ils soient importants.
- Des travaux de recherche supplémentaires sont nécessaires sur les effets plus larges à saisir et les outils permettant de le faire.
- L’ACA peut jouer un rôle important dans la prise de décision, mais ne doit pas occuper une place prépondérante.
Cruise Shipping and Urban Development: The Case of Piraeus
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
28 June 2017
- Develop a strategy to attract tourists to the city of Piraeus.
- Facilitate stakeholder co-operation to boost competitiveness of Piraeus as a cruise destination.
- Work to reduce the environmental impacts of cruise shipping on Piraeus.
Airport Site Selection
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
30 May 2017
- The process should start with an assessment of need for new infrastructure.
- Comparable assessments should be undertaken for a range of feasible options.
- Selection criteria need to examine all positive and negative impacts of airport capacity expansion.
- Assessments need to incorporate considerations of risk and uncertainty.
- The process needs to be clear, transparent, collaborative, and trade-offs need to be explicitly considered.
Local Governments and Ports
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
23 May 2017
- Develop tailor-made governance arrangements for ports.
- Allow decentralised port governance to create additional benefits for local communities.
- Coordinate public port investment, nationally and where possible at a supra-national level.
- Ensure that ports not only focus on profits, but also take local impacts into account.
Strategic Infrastructure Planning: International Best Practice
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
23 March 2017
- Systemic risks can be reduced where projects form part of a broad and long-term strategic plan.
- Strategic infrastructure planning carries its own risks, including technology's influence on demand- and supply-side considerations.
- When it works well, strategic planning can set out a stable set of priorities for future investment with durable cross-party support.
- A successful infrastructure planning process balances a stable framework with maintaining flexibility.
- The planning process requires clear objectives, a degree of independence and an open, collaborative approach.
- The planning methodology needs to address risks and uncertainties, take into account binding policy constraints and include considerations of pricing the use of infrastructure.
- A top-down approach to infrastructure planning to complement traditional project by project assessment is essential to a strategic assessment of long-term economic infrastructure needs across sectors.
- Infrastructure planning across sectors can help identify the most important systemic risks early.
- Using analytical methods such as a scenario-based approach to analysis can be helpful in future-proofing infrastructure plans.
- It is important to consider how demand for scarce infrastructure can be managed. Debt management need to be part of any strategic investment plan.
- A top-down approach could foster the development of an analytical framework for investment decisions reflecting both demand and supply side considerations.
Ex-Post Assessment of Transport Investments and Policy Interventions
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
27 February 2017
- Data collection for evaluation needs to be planned for from the outset.
- Audit transport projects throughout the project stages
- Use independent organisations to carry out audits of transport projects.
- Recognise the variety of economic goals targeted by transport investments.
- Involve local partners in providing evidence on performance.
Public Private Partnerships for Transport Infrastructure: Renegotiation and Economic Outcomes
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
23 February 2017
- Use renegotiation of PPPs only in exceptional cases.
- Use an independent jury to assess whether the outcome of a PPP is what parties might have been expected to negotiate had they foreseen a change that has occurred.
- Consider to task an independent body with determining when renegotiation of a PPP is legitimate.
- Include reputation and demonstrated competence in selection criteria for a PPP.
- Compare advantages and weaknesses of PPPs versus other forms of private capital.
Cruise Shipping and Urban Development: The Case of Dublin
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
22 January 2017
- Implement the Alexandra Basin Redevelopment Project.
- Develop a joint cruise strategy for the whole city.
- Better exploit Dublin’s asset as potential home port.
- Resolve constraints related to cruise passenger flows.
- Develop a green cruise port policy.
Quantifying the Socio-economic Benefits of Transport
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
20 January 2017
- Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) guidelines can be expanded to include reliability and some wider impacts.
- Further research into reliability benefits is needed to improve confidence in results.
- Wider economic impacts should be examined in cases where they are expected to be significant.
- Further research into the impacts and tools for capturing wider impacts is needed.
- Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) can play an important role in decision making, but need not dominate.
The Impact of Mega-Ships: The Case of Gothenburg
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
11 January 2017
- Develop a focused national ports policy for Sweden.
- Make it easier for the Port of Gothenburg to attract direct calls by container ships.
- Resolve bottlenecks related to mega-ships.
Cruise Shipping and Urban Development: The Case of Venice
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
21 December 2016
- Create certainty about the future of cruise shipping in Venice.
- Develop a tourism strategy for the city including guidance on which tourists to prioritise.
- Develop instruments to contain the number of tourists in the city of Venice.
- Develop an action plan for extracting more value from home port passengers.
- Give a more structural character to environmental policies that have a discontinuous nature.
Adapting Transport to Climate Change and Extreme Weather
Research Report, Policy Insights,
14 December 2016
- Act now to preserve the value of transport infrastructure and maintain network performance.
- Protect transport infrastructure against climate impacts through good maintenance.
- Prepare for more frequent and unexpected failure of transport infrastructure.
- Account for temporary unavailability of transport assets in in service continuity plans.
- Assess vulnerability of transport assets and networks from climate change and extreme weather.
- Focus on transport system resilience, not just on designing robust infrastructure.
- Re-evaluate thinking on redundant transport infrastructure.
- Do not rely solely on cost-benefit analysis for appraising the value of transport infrastructure.
- Develop new decision-support tools that incorporate deep uncertainty into asset appraisal.
Airport Demand Forecasting for Long-Term Planning
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
6 July 2016
- Use quantitative methods to analyse the key drivers of airport demand.
- Use expert guidance to help interpret the quantitative results.
- Quality-assure the analysis and counter the risks of optimism bias.
- Reflect the risks and uncertainties that arise in even the best forecasts.
- Make better use of demand forecasts in airport infrastructure planning.
Capacity to Grow: Transport Infrastructure Needs for Future Trade Growth
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
8 May 2016
- Develop planning tools to adapt to uncertainties: Good port planning means planning for uncertainties.
- Increase port capacity by optimising existing terminals.
- Take a holistic planning approach to improving port capacity needs as part of the entire supply chain.
- Use funding as a balancing tool in port capacity development.
Adapting Transport Policy to Climate Change
Research Report, Policy Insights,
30 November 2015
- Uncertainty is different from risk.
- Climate effects are subject to uncertainty.
- There are techniques to deal with risk.
- There is currently no robust method to treat Knightian uncertainty.
- Risk, uncertainty and discount rate all affect carbon value.