Evaluating the Long-Term Leasing of Toll Roads Based on the Value for Money Framework and Multiple-Criteria Technique

摘要

The long-term leasing of toll roads, a type of public-private partnership (PPP), has been attracting the attention of state governments since the two landmark cases of the Chicago Skyway and the Indiana Toll Road in 2005 and 2006, respectively. In order to assist public agencies in making appropriate decisions to enter PPP agreements that are in the best interest of taxpayers, a general framework is established in this paper for evaluating the long-term leasing of toll roads. Value for money (VfM) analysis, which takes into account transferred risks and retained risks through probabilistic techniques, is used as a main criterion for measuring the economic efficiency from the public sector perspective. User benefits and user costs are incorporated with VfM through multiple-criteria techniques. The evaluation framework is demonstrated using a case study of the lease of the Indiana Toll Road. The analysis shows that over the lease period, there is little likelihood that the Indiana public agency, if it had continued in-house management of the toll road, could have earned at least the same financial return as the upfront payment lease amount paid by the lessee. The multiple-criteria approach also confirmed the results.