Analyzing voter support for California’s local option sales taxes for transportation

Local and regional governments in the U.S. rely increasingly on voter-approved local option sales taxes (LOSTs) to fund transportation capital investments, maintenance, and operations. LOSTs typically present voters with lists of local transportation projects and programs to be funded by a ¼ to 1 percent sales tax increase. Most research on LOSTs are case studies, which make generalizations about LOSTs difficult. We conducted a comprehensive, multi-jurisdictional analysis of LOST measures in California, the U.S. state with the greatest number of LOST measures. We examined 76 LOST measures put to voters between 1976 and 2016 to assess factors associated with voter support. LOSTs in California are enacted by counties, which we examined in addition to smaller intra-county geographies using both regression models and case studies. We tested several explanatory variables for association with voter support including macroeconomic and political context, planned measure expenditures, voter characteristics, and spatial distribution of proposed projects. We found that funding dedicated to public transit and returned to local jurisdictions predicts support at the county level, and that LOSTs that create new taxes—as opposed to extending or renewing existing taxes—are less popular with voters, all else equal. Our analyses of sub-county geographies revealed that political party affiliation is the strongest predictor of local voter support for LOSTs and that voters living adjacent to funded projects tended to be more supportive of LOSTs.

     

Donor states and donee states: investigating geographic redistribution of the US federal-aid highway program 1974–2008

In 2009, the US government spent more than $42 billion on the federal-aid highway program. Most of this money was raised from motor vehicle taxes, whose proceeds are deposited in the highway trust fund. Federal motor vehicle user taxes flow into the fund and aid expenditures flow out from it to build and maintain highways and other transportation infrastructure. With so much money at stake it should be no surprise that expenditure decisions are the subject of intense political debate. Chief among these debates is the conflict between donor states, whose residents pay more in highway user taxes than the state receives in federal highway aid and donee states, whose residents pay less in highway user taxes than the state receives in highway aid. While this geographic redistribution has been masked recently by infusions of general fund revenue into the trust fund, the debate nevertheless continues. This paper attempts to understand why some states are donors and others are donees by simultaneously testing four hypotheses about the geographic redistribution of federal highway dollars that relate to a state’s highway need, economic condition, level of urbanization, and representation on the key Congressional oversight committees. The analyses show that redistribution does not favor states with larger highway systems, more highway use, or lower median incomes, all of which are different indicators of need. Instead, states that are less urban and better represented on the four key Congressional committees generally benefit from redistribution. These findings indicate that the user tax revenues are not used in places where they are most needed. Thus they provide little empirical support for any compelling policy argument for continued geographic redistribution of federal highway user tax dollars.     

Coastal Management Using Public Judgments,Importance Scales,and Predetermined Schedule

A predetermined schedule of sanctions and regulations that reflect both scientific knowledge of resources and the preference and judgments of resource users in the community may provide a useful guide for management decisions involving complex coastal resource systems. Such a schedule can be implemented by constructing scales reflecting public judgments of the relative importance of adverse impacts on resources, or of activities causing such impacts. The importance scales can then be used to assess existing regulations and current management priorities and to serve as a guide for revisions and changes to current practice, for the design of new policy, for rationalizing regulatory controls, and for determining damage awards and other deterrence sanctions. The resulting evolution of a schedule can improve the consistency of resource use with community preferences by, for example, prescribing more severe restrictions on what are widely agreed to be more serious harms and lesser controls on less important ones. The application of this approach is demonstrated using Ban Don Bay, Thailand.     

The Cost of Nutrient Reduction: A Case Study of Chesapeake Bay

Over $3.5 billion were spent toward nutrient controls in the Chesapeake Bay watershed between 1985 and 1996. These expenditures were based on cost-shares between federal, state, local, and private sources and should be considered conservative. A comparison of point and nonpoint nutrient control expenditures in the Bay basin showed that about 50% of the funds were directed toward agricultural best management practices and 45% were allocated for point source nutrient reductions and combined sewer overflows (20% and 25%, respectively). The remainder was spent on various other estuarine-targeted programs. Maryland was responsible for 79% of the total expenditures, 16% was expended by Virginia, and the remainder was attributable to the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania (4% and 1%, respectively). The most costly basin was the Patuxent (over $125 per kilogram of total nitrogen removed) and the least costly was the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where the cost was just under $21 per kilogram of nitrogen removed. For the control practices examined, the analysis found that nutrient management was the least costly. Animal waste control and low tillage were the second and third most economical nutrient management strategies. Significant reductions were achieved from point sources for both total nitrogen (16%) and total phosphorus (53%) by 1996. Virtually all of the large reduction in point source phosphorus was a result of the phosphorus detergent ban implemented basinwide in the late 1980s. Nonpoint source nutrient reductions were more modest. An approximate 12% reduction in phosphorus was accompanied by an 8% reduction in total nitrogen loadings. Despite these nutrient reductions, no significant improvements in bottom-dissolved oxygen levels were detected along the Bay mainstem during the warmer months, and the mouth of Chesapeake Bay showed marginally significant degradation during the 11-year period. It was determined that dissolved oxygen conditions were influenced more by nitrogen than phosphorus reductions and that nutrient controls aimed at the mid-Bay region had the greatest potential for improving low dissolved oxygen conditions in the Bay's bottom waters.     

Recent progress on wave induced loading measurements in warships

Recent measurements of wave induced hull strain and flexure in RN warships are presented together with the derivation of the current design criteria for extreme hull girder bending loads. The history of the development of the shipboard instrumentation used is given and recent developments to improve the quality and ease of analysis of the data are described. An unexpectedly high transverse asymmetry in the longitudinal strains measured in destroyers is shown to be the result of a combination of vertical and lateral bending in oblique seas. Finally recent theoretical comparisons between the loading of Deep-Vee hulls and conventional UK rounded bilge hulls are presented which demonstrate the higher loading experienced by this type of hull form.     

Consumers as participants in transportation planning

Legal requirements for public participation in transportation planning increase the opportunity for transportation consumers to influence the design of systems they will use. However, the implementation of these requirements may also increase the possibility that system design will be dominated by the opinions of outspoken groups. This study postulates that public participation is biased, and seeks to test this proposition using data from an Oregon survey consisting of approximately 2,400 respondents. Using Automatic Interaction Detector and cross tabulation analyses, different participation rates were uncovered for groups identified by demographic, attitudinal and behavioral variables.The authors thank the Oregon Department of Transportation for making the original data for the study available.