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Distinguished Lecture Series: Fall 2003
November 14, 2002 3:00 pm
UVA Rotunda Dome Room |
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| A Quiet Revolution in Transportation Finance |
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| Martin Wachs , PhD |
Abstract
For over eighty years the transportation system has been paid for through a system of "user fees", typified by tolls, motor vehicle registration fees, and motor fuel taxes, which by statute, have been "earmarked" for transportation uses. Most other developed countries do not rely on user fees, but instead fund transportation out of general revenues and put transportation taxes to the general support of a wide variety of government services. This seminar will begin with a history of user fee financing in transportation, and will summarize its consequences and compare it with other systems of transportation support.
While user fee financing is falling off, a variety of alternative mechanisms for financial support of transportation are becoming increasingly popular, especially local voter-supported sales taxes. Professor Wachs will show the growth of such measures nationally, and will summarize the results of research on the implication of such taxes in California.
Is the trend toward declining user support of transportation and increasing general tax support a good one or a bad one? The positive and negative arguments will be presented, and in general Professor Wachs will conclude that user fee financing is superior. He will suggest that in the longer term user fees for transportation can be "modernized" in such a way as to make them politically attractive, and will address the short term political difficulties associated with policies that move in that direction.
Biography of Speaker
Martin Wachs is Professor of City and Regional Planning and of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University O California, Berkeley. Until July, 1996, he was Professor of Urban Planning and Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA, where he had been a member of the faculty since 1971, and where he served three terms as Head of the Urban Planning Program.
Professor Wachs holds a Bachelors Degree in Civil Engineering from the City University of New York, and MS and Ph.D. degrees in Transportation Planning from the Civil Engineering Department at Northwestern University. Before joining UCLA he was an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been a visiting professor at Oxford University, Rutgers University, The University of Iowa, and The Technion. In 1986 he received an award for being a "Distinguished Planning Educator" from the California Planning Foundation, and a Distinguished Teaching Award form the UCLA Alumni Association.
Dr. Wachs is the author or editor of four books and has written over one hundred published articles on transportation planning and policy, including the transportation needs of elderly and handicapped people; fare and subsidy policies in urban transportation, the problem of crime in public transit systems, and methods for the evaluation of alternative transportation projects. He has also done historical studies of the relationship between transportation investments and urban form in the early part of the twentieth century, and on ethics in planning and forecasting. Recently, his writings have dealt with the relationship between transportation, air quality and land use, and transportation finance.
Dr. Wachs currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Transportation Research Board and recently completed a term as a member of the California Commission on transportation Investment. He is currently a member of the Advisory Committee on Research and Development for the California Department of Transportation, and recently completed his term as the first Chair of the Advisory Panel for the Travel Model Improvement Program of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
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