"TRB's National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 689: Costs of Alternative Revenue-Generation Systems presents a framework for analysis of the direct costs incurred in generating the revenues that support federal-aid and state highway construction, operations, and maintenance and uses that framework to estimate unit costs for fuel taxes, tolling, vehicle-miles of travel fees, and cordon pricing schemes."--pub. desc.

A suite of recent policy and legislative initiatives are prioritizing a shift towards electrification of the personal-use vehicle fleet. This agenda is intimately tied to another complex issue: the sustainability of the primary transportation funding source (i.e., the gas tax—also known as the motor fuel tax). What makes this particularly hard is that gasoline consumption is only a proxy for “amount of travel.” With diversification in fuel sources and a concerted movement towards non-fossil fuel sources to power vehicles, any specific fuel source would be (at best) a weak or (at worst) grossly inequitable representation for amount of travel. Toward an Integrated Transportation Pricing Approach Using Vehicle-based Technologies will focus on some of the larger questions for an integrated pricing system based on miles driven that are measured directly using vehicle-based or in-vehicle technology communicating directly with infrastructure systems. Click here to access the full SAE EDGETM Research Report portfolio. https://doi.org/10.4271/EPR2024003

Three decades ago, conservative ideologues at The Heritage Foundation produced a primer on the Reagan Revolution entitled Mandate for Leadership, which offered an overarching philosophy against the role of government and in favor of markets. This volume, produced by the Institute for Policy Studies, which since 1963 has been the nation's leading progressive policy organization, offers a set of specific policy proposals for the incoming national administration on every major domestic and international topic, written specifically for the book by a leading thinker and activist in the field. These chapters set forth a fundamental, badly needed 'mandate for change' to reinvigorate government and rethink the role of markets and civil society. Each one includes an essay supporting the proposed policies and a resource list of relevant organizations, websites, and readings. It is perfect for public policy courses at the undergraduate and graduate level.