Examining the Potential Impacts of Maintenance Investment and Capital Reinvestment in Vermont’s Roadway Infrastructure Network

The United States is facing a serious crisis with respect to transportation funding. Traditional revenue sources such as gas taxes, vehicle tolls, and Highway Trust Fund (HTF) distributions are not providing adequate revenue streams to keep up with increasing infrastructure maintenance and repair costs. This funding crisis has put intense pressure on transportation agencies to come up with newer, more innovative funding strategies. One such innovative funding strategy is referred to as strategic reinvestment / disinvestment. Conventional transportation investment alternatives are typically categorized as either maintenance, repair, replacement, or expansion. Conversely, disinvestment alternatives are categorized as deferment of action, modification of standards, decommissioning assets, or a change of jurisdiction. Strategic reinvestment / disinvestment generally involves: 1) clearly prioritizing transportation goals and objectives, 2) identifying the projects and/or assets that are most important with respect to obtaining various goals as well as projects and/or assets that are the least important or least critical in obtaining those goals, 3) and then consciously defunding or reducing funding allocated to lower priority transportation assets and ideally reinvesting those savings into higher-priority assets. This report summarizes the current state of practice related to the implementation of different reinvestment / disinvestment strategies at the state level and examines how some of these strategies may be employed in the state of Vermont. In this report, the authors not only identify candidate corridors for disinvestment based on quantifiable measures of how critical or important the corridors are to traffic flow throughout the roadway network as a whole, but also consider how disinvestments might impact access to critical services (i.e. access to hospitals and police / fire services), and whether or not the disinvestment might have a disproportionate impact on vulnerable populations in the state.

• Record URL:
  http://vtrans.vermont.gov/sites/aot/files/highway/documents/materialsandresearch/completedprojects/Disinvestment%20Final%20Report%20%28VTrans%20Approved%29.pdf
• 
• Corporate Authors:

  University of Vermont, Burlington

  Transportation Research Center
  210 Colchester Avenue
  Burlington, VT  United States  05405-1757

  Vermont Agency of Transportation

  Montpelier, VT  United States 
• Authors:
  • Sentoff, Karen
  • Sullivan, James
  • Novak, David C
  • Dowds, Jonathan
• Publication Date: 2017-1-6

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Edition: Final Report
• Features: Appendices; Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 60p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Asset management; Financing; Impacts; Investments; Maintenance; State of the practice; Transportation corridors; Transportation planning; Vulnerable road users
• Uncontrolled Terms: Disinvestments
• Geographic Terms: Vermont
• Subject Areas: Finance; Highways; Maintenance and Preservation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01633302
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: TRC Report 17-001
• Files: TRIS, ATRI, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Apr 28 2017 10:42AM