Commentary
If the “user pays” idea is worth saving, the United States needs a different calculation, writes Liisa Ecola. Some states are looking at mileage fees. With mileage fees, you pay based on the number of miles you drive, rather than the number of gallons of gas used.
Commentary
Mileage-fee rates could be structured to reduce congestion, harmful emissions and excessive road wear, and the enabling technology could support a range of value-added services offering greater convenience and safety for motorists, writes Keith Crane.
Tool
An illustrated guide provides state and local decisionmakers with a high-level synopsis of mileage fee issues: policy motivations, technical options, key challenges, and emerging strategies to address those challenges.
Commentary
There is no need for privacy concerns to halt all discussion of new technologies to help address America's mounting transportation funding crisis, writes Liisa Ecola.
Report
Estimates changes in annual vehicle miles traveled in response to changes in the cost of driving that would result from adopting a mileage-based user fee.
Journal Article
Federal subsidies and policies to encourage plug-in vehicle adoption would produce more benefits at lower cost by targeting the purchase of vehicles with small battery packs.
Report
The authors explore six potential approaches to pricing the use of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) wind-tunnel test facilities, and they evaluate each approach against three criteria -- efficiency, fiscal impact, and fairness.
Journal Article
To reduce air emission and oil dependency impacts from passenger vehicles, strategies to promote adoption of hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs) and plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles with small battery packs offer more social benefits per dollar spent.
Commentary
Our transportation future will be multi-layered and complex—bounded by transportation infrastructure that is under-funded on the one hand and ever-expanding congestion and capacity constraints on the other, writes Johanna Zmud.
Past Event
Liisa Ecola discusses how to make up for the declining revenues generated by the federal fuel tax due to inflation and improved fuel economy.
Research Brief
Assesses alternate mechanisms for implementing fees to fund the nation's road network based on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and outlines a plan for large-scale system trials to further evaluate the most promising concepts.
Report
Develops a unified decisionmaking approach for selecting aeronautics research agendas that quantifies the social and economic reasons for the research, balances competing perspectives, and enables transparent explanation of the resulting decisions.
Report
The U.S. Air Force asked RAND Project AIR FORCE to perform a congressionally required assessment of contractor versus organic management of F-22 sustainment to determine the most cost-effective approach, the methodology for which is described here.
Report
Three essays explore the implicit private costs of improving vehicle fuel efficiencies, the private benefits and social impacts of electric vehicles, and the implications of a large-scale adoption of electric vehicles for transportation finance.
Journal Article
This research is an initial step toward creating policies to address autonomous vehicle technologies—which have the potential to enormously benefit humankind but raise substantial concern about tort liability for damages that may result from their use.
News Release
The long-term efficiency and effectiveness of the U.S. freight transportation system is threatened by bottlenecks, inefficient use of some parts of the infrastructure components, vulnerability to disruptions, and crucial environmental and energy concerns.
Past Event
This RAND Supply Chain Policy Center Symposium on Modernizing the U.S. Freight Transportation System for Future Economic Growth will present recent findings on supply chain sustainability, and will offer several promising policy and investment alternatives to address identified challenges.
News Release
Policymakers need to address equity concerns early when implementing congestion pricing to improve traffic flow, as each situation is unique and must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Commentary
President Obama's infrastructure plan doesn’t yet carry a price tag. We only know that it will be big.... The trick is how it will be done. It will not be enough to simply rebuild and repair critical infrastructure systems. We need to reinvent the systems themselves, writes Martin Wachs.
Research Brief
Alternative fuels derived from oil sands and from coal liquefaction can cost-effectively diversify fuel supplies, but neither type significantly reduces U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions enough to arrest long-term climate change.
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