An Investigation of the Traffic Safety Performance of PPP Transportation Projects in the United States

Public-private partnerships (PPP) have been initiated by several governments in order to gain time and cost efficiencies in the delivery of transportation infrastructure assets and services. With operation and maintenance becoming parts of the contracted services under the performance-based PPP agreements, it is expected that the private partners will exert the efforts to keep the facilities at the best physical conditions and level of service. Little, however, have been published citing whether PPP can have any impact on the roadway safety. The research in this area shows that PPP agreements in the United States have provided no special attention to safety incentives to encourage the private partners to improve safety. PPP industry practitioners emphasized on that PPP through its quality maintenance, fast response to incidence, and management of traffic to keep congestion at minimum will all provide for better and safer roads. This research provides an initial investigation on whether PPPs would have any impact on roadway safety. While the number of PPP projects that are operational are not large, the research carried out descriptive and statistical analysis on nearly most of the projects that are operational. Accidents, fatalities, and injuries on PPP projects, their localities, and states were analyzed. The findings show that safety rates on PPPs do have better safety figures than those of traditionally delivered highways, but not on all dimensions. This should be considered in line with the fact that none of the PPP projects in the United States provided for incentives on roadway safety improvements.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE10 Standing Committee on Revenue and Finance. Alternate title: Investigation of Traffic Safety Performance of U.S. PPP Transportation Projects.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Shang, Luming
  • Aziz, Ahmed M Abdel
  • Migliaccio, Giovanni
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Crash rates; Fatalities; Highways; Injury rates; Public private partnerships; Safety management; Statistical analysis; Traffic safety
• Geographic Terms: United States
• Subject Areas: Administration and Management; Highways; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01622777
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-06654
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 20 2017 9:06AM