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Due to the great increase in motor vehicle traffic, the provision of highways, roads, streets and bridges has become a most important function of government at the present time. Complications arise because the vehicles using the public roads are privately owned and operated. [...]

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Despite its significance and frequent mentioning in the literature, the relationship between road investment and economic development has never been clearly understood. A significant number of scholars in this field have always emphasized the need for further research to examine this complex and dynamic relationship. Historically, investment in transportation networks has played a great role in the development of cities, regions, and nations. This positive view is attributed to the indispensable role that water transportation, and then rail transport, played in the early development of Europe and the United States. In recent years, many scholars, as well as policy makers, have disputed that investment in transportation, and in particular roads, in the regions of a highly developed country like the United States will have a great impact on economic development. This disagreement and speculation about the role of transportation investment, especially roads which constitute a large portion of the transportation network, on economic development has made justification for roads funding difficult. This is coupled with the recent decline in federal funding for many civilian programs, and in particular, regional economic development program, that include investment in road systems. Furthermore, rising construction and maintenance costs for major highway systems have substantially out-paced the current funding levels. As a result of the shortage of roads funding and the lack of federal support, individual states have started to take on more responsibility for keeping their road network intact. In almost all the states in the nation, and Oregon is no exception, the state Departments of Transportation have started to use economic development as a criterion for roads funding. Therefore, it is the objective of this dissertation to examine the longitudinal impact of the various types of roads investments on economic development in Oregon in order to better understand this dynamic relationship. Total road expenditures, capital expenditures in the three types of roads (primary, secondary, and local), total maintenance expenditures, and maintenance expenditures in the three types of roads are used as a measure of road investments. Total employment to growth and employment to growth in manufacturing and service sectors are used as a measure of economic development. In order to achieve the above objective, the Granger Causality test at different level of aggregation is used to examine this relationship. First, the state as a single aggregate unit is used to examine the effect of the various road investments on the three employment to growth sectors. Second, different spatial groupings, such as Portland Metropolitan Counties vs. the rest of the state Counties, Urban Counties, vs. Rural Counties, Interstate Counties vs. Non-Interstate Counties, Coastal Counties vs. Non-Coastal Counties, and the Department of Transportation's five designated regions are used to examine this relationship. Finally, the county level as a single disaggregate unit is also used. The results highlighted the complexity of the relationship between road investments and economic development. The nature of this relationship varies from one region to another, and mainly depends on the level of aggregation in determining the direction of this relationship. At the aggregate level, the state as one geographic unit, the various road investments have a positive impact on the employment to growth in this region. In particular, total road expenditure and capital expenditure on primary and secondary roads have a one-way directional relationship runs from the various road expenditures to employment to growth, and the effect of this investment is long-term. This analysis also indicates that the different spatial groupings have demonstrated different relationships. Nevertheless, the general pattern for most spatial groupings tends to suggest either a one-way directional relationship runs from the various road expenditures to employment to growth or a bi-directional relationship. No findings support the hypothesis that employment to growth in the three economic sectors causes road expenditures, with the exception of very few cases, especially at the lower end of the analysis at the county level, where the results are highly discrepant and mixed. In addition, this research indicates that the time-lag effect measured by lag-length and accumulative lag effect changes as the level of aggregation changes. However, the general pattern seems to indicate that total road expenditures and capital expenditures for the three types of roads, particularly primary and secondary roads, have a long-term effect on employment to growth. Also, the relative magnitude effect of total road expenditures and capital expenditures on primary and secondary roads is greater on the employment to growth than is the comparable effect of maintenance expenditures in most spatial groupings. Furthermore, the effect of the various road expenditures on the type of employment (manufacturing and service) depends greatly on the level of aggregation and the type of road Investment Finally, this study provides public policy makers, transportation planners, and regional economic developers a better understanding of the complex relationship between road investment and economic development. A better understanding of this highly complex and dynamic relationship can guide decision makers to best utilize their limited resources. In addition, this research offers insight into the theories and works in the field of transportation and economic development.

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This dissertation examines “post-agrarian” transformations in Kenyan rural areas. But where rural transformation is usually written as a story about land, Black Spots is a story about roads. Kenya’s massive investment in roads infrastructure over the last decade has intersected with the decline in smallholder agriculture in such a way that, for many rural residents, fortunes are now imagined on the road rather than on the land. Roadside trade, transport, and even salvage from crashes provide supplementary livings for rural populations facing declining agricultural opportunities. The dissertation argues that in the context of austerity policies and rural abandonment, road work and its “fast money” not only expose roadside residents to physical danger, but also entrench entrepreneurial risk ideology into local imaginaries. With the road accident as a lens illuminating a wider landscape of rural hazard, the dissertation shows how rural residents refashion relationships to land, work, technology, and loss in high-risk environments. At the same time, it demonstrates the limits of “risk”—that is, a calculated engagement with potential loss, conducted in the interest of profit—as a framework for managing contingency. In this sense, Black Spots is both an ethnography of risk and of what risk fails to capture. It tracks how rural residents learn to engage bodily and economic hazard and to understand it as risk; how they coordinate the disparate temporalities and technologies of life on the road and life on the land; and how they withstand loss when these attempts do not go as planned. The dissertation thus advances two parallel concerns: on the one hand, it demonstrates how economic practice is at once bodily and reasoned. On the other, it considers how experiences of and ideas about contingency are shaped in relation to shifting economic, social, and infrastructural possibilities.

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The goal of the research is to devise an equitable road pricing system which would leave the majority of routes free of tolls, so that low income people would suffer no cash loss although they would probably suffer loss of time. The aims of the dissertation are twofold. The first is to provide a numerical analysis of how urban commuters with differing abilities to pay would respond to additional road user charges. The welfare implications of such differential responses are examined and their policy implications analysed. The second aim is to develop a practical framework to model congestion pricing policies in the context of heterogeneous users. To achieve these aims, the following objectives have been set: (a) Using a simple network with two parallel competing routes, determine both welfare maximising and revenue maximising tolls under the constraint that only one route can be priced. In this setting, determine the allocation of traffic between the alternative routes, the efficiency gain, the revenue, the changes in travel cost and the distributional effects. (b) Establish a realistic model of an actual urban area to examine the impacts of selectively tolling congestible routes. As in the simple network case, assess the effects of toll policy on traffic distribution, network efficiency, revenues, and the welfare of the individual consumer and society. (c) Evaluate whether the non-identical treatment of users will enhance the acceptability of congestion pricing as a transport policy. Results from the simulations indicate that non-identical treatment of drivers? responses to toll charges provides better understanding of the differential impacts of various pricing policies. Allowing for heterogeneity in time valuation provides a better assessment of the efficiency of pricing policies and of the welfare impacts of toll charges, as it is able to capture their differential effects. More importantly, it shows that low-income commuters may not be significantly worse off with pricing especially when there is a free alternative route. This research demonstrates the need to adopt appropriate analytical techniques and assumptions when modelling the traffic equilibrium in a network with tolls. These include relaxing the homogeneity assumption, examining sensitivity to supply function parameter values and to the effect of vehicle operating cost, and using a route rather than link based measure of consumer surplus