Transportation agencies around the world have long faced fiscal challenges caused by the gap between the costs of preserving and expanding highway infrastructure and available highway program funding. In most other countries high motor fuel taxes are generally used for non-transportation social programs. The lack of dedicated public funding sources for transportation and the burdens placed on rail and highway infrastructure by a growing global economy prompted transportation policymakers overseas, especially in Western Europe, to develop and apply alternative ways to finance and deliver needed transportation infrastructure since the early 1990s. A number of countries in Europe and Asia have turned to the private sector for relief in the form of contractual public-private partnerships.
In the United States, the public sector's interest in PPPs has been stimulated by the widening gap between the needs for improving and expanding our aging transportation systems and the scarce public funding to address these needs. Facing increasing congestion, declining accessibility, unreliable freight delivery, and obsolete facilities, transportation officials have begun to realize traditional project delivery and financing approaches cannot come close to addressing these needs. PPPs offer public sponsors of transportation projects the potential to expedite their transportation programs and leverage scarce public resources by accessing private sector best practices, new technology, and capital markets to deliver and operate transportation facilities in a more timely and cost-effective manner. With the U.S. Department of Transportation and its surface transportation administrations encouraging state and local transportation agencies to consider the selective use of PPP approaches to expedite urgent transportation projects, there is significant opportunity for these agencies to add PPPs to their project delivery options.