Establishing Criteria and their Weights for Evaluating Transportation Funding Alternatives Using a Delphi Survey

摘要

For more than a decade, transportation officials in the US have been concerned that, at current levels, the fuel tax, which is the primary surface transportation funding source in the US, would not provide enough revenue to satisfy the ever rising transportation needs. Political and public support for raising the fuel tax is lacking, and fuel tax revenue has not kept pace with construction costs because it is not indexed to inflation. Increase in fuel efficiency is expected to reduce the fuel tax revenue. While there are many funding alternatives such as increasing the fuel tax, replacing it with a mileage based tax, increasing sales tax and tolling, officials from transportation agencies and policy makers need to reach a consensus on the best or preferable alternative to be implemented. Due to the differences in their backgrounds as well as their objectives, they may have different priorities. In this research, the authors organize a structured communication among many Texas-based transportation officials and the Texas Legislative Committee members’ staff using the Delphi method to obtain their opinions about the criteria and their weights to be used for evaluating transportation funding alternatives. Through this process, the authors try to build a consensus among the members of this expert panel by feeding back the group response for their review. The result of this survey is a set of criteria and their weights, which can be used to evaluate transportation funding alternatives for the state of Texas. The criteria weights seem to indicate that the panelists recognize the importance of public opinion and its impact on reaching a legislative solution. The panelists appear to be less concerned about criteria that may be addressed through modifications to the funding alternatives and research. This research shows that the funding policy is not seen as a tool for improving user efficiency, which opposes the common view in the literature that encourages replacement of fuel tax with a vehicle mileage tax involving high implementation and operating cost.