Urban Transport: Can Public-Private Partnerships Work?

Poor maintenance, slow expansion of streets and urban highways and excessive congestion are chronic in many cities. This chapter argues that public-private partnerships (PPPs) can be used to improve the timing of new investments, ensure adequate maintenance of highways and streets and manage congestion with road user charges. Nevertheless, PPPs will only work with timely public planning, deft contract design and enforcement and competent inter jurisdiction coordination. Moreover, to reflect the fact that PPPs do not relieve the public budget and ensure that PPPs are preferred over public provision based on efficiency criteria, fiscal accounting of PPPs must be identical to fiscal accounting of public projects.