Category: 2015 Events

On August 6, 2015, the Center co-sponsored a small and minority business networking event with Skanska USA, one of the world’s foremost construction groups leading numerous Public-Private Partnership (P3) projects in the U.S. to include the Elizabeth River Crossing in Virginia and I-4 Ultimate in Florida. More than 50 representatives from small businesses in the Washington metropolitan area attended the event at the Arlington campus.

After a welcome and opening remarks by Dr. Porter Wheeler on behalf of the Center, Skanka’s Martin Sharpless introduced a series of presentations on current and future Skanska projects in the DC area (such as D.C. Water and Sewer Headquarters, Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, etc.) and outlined procedures for small businesses seeking to work with Skanska.

The presentation and discussion by Reneé Jones, Senior Regional Diversity Director (Southeast) at Skanska, revealed differences between small and minority business recruitment processes for P3s and traditional procurement projects. Jones remarked that recruitment for small businesses could start even before the submission of the proposal in order to build capacity for bidding the project. Because P3 projects tend to last for over 30 years, the recruiting of small businesses may continue throughout the life of the project.

The event provided small businesses in attendance the opportunity to network and gain valuable insight into the ways in which they can become more involved in P3 projects and collaborate with a large construction company that is at the forefront of the P3 industry.

Jeong Yun Kweun (known to colleagues as “JK”) presented a poster at the First Annual Symposium on Transportation Informatics. August 13-14, 2015, Buffalo, New York; “Measuring Demand Elasticity for U.S. Toll Roads: An Aggregate Analysis of Panel Toll Data Collected from a Large Sample of U.S. Tolled Roads” with Dr. Shanjiang Zhu, Assistant Professor, Civil, Environmental & Infrastructure Engineering, Volgenau School of Engineering.

In June, JK also completed a one week program at MIT on discrete choice models.  The session was instructed by Moshe Ben-Akiva and focused on Discrete Choice Analysis Predicting Demand and Market Shares.  She was  awarded half-tuition scholarship to attend the program.

On July 9, Center Director Jonathan Gifford guest lectured to a summer MBA graduate course on privatization and P3s at George Washington University. The professor of the graduate course invited Gifford to speak to his class after seeing his presentation on VDOT at the Cambridge ISNIE conference. Gifford’s presentation, titled The Governance of Surface Transportation in the 21st Century: Understanding the Challenges of Implementing New Technologies and New Procurement Methods,” was co-authored by Center Graduate Research Associates Lisardo Bolaños, Nobuhiko Daito, and Jeong Yun Kweun.

Click here to see Professor Gifford’s presentation.

Center Director Jonathan Gifford presented a paper entitled,  “The Governance of Surface Transportation in the 21st Century: Understanding the Challenges of Implementing New Technologies and New Procurement Methods” as part of the Privatization and Public-Private Partnership panel at the 19th Annual Conference of The International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE). The conference was held at the Harvard Law School, June 18-20. Click here to download Dr. Gifford’s full presentation.

On Wednesday, June 3, Center Director Jonathan Gifford testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Small Business hearing titled, “The Road Ahead: Small Businesses and the Need for a Long-Term Surface Transportation Reauthorization.” The purpose of the hearing is to examine small firm participation in the surface transportation construction industry.

Download Testimony

Center Director Jonathan Gifford and Graduate Research Associates Nobuhiko Daito and Lisardo Bolaños travelled to Austin, Texas May 26-29 to participate in the 2^nd International Conference on Public-Private Partnerships (ICPPP), co-sponsored by the Center. The conference focused primarily on financing policies; financial viability and risk analysis of P3 Projects; design, construction, operation and management of P3 infrastructure projects; and legal issues related to P3s.

Dr. Gifford served as a coordinator on the International Scientific Committee, helping to draft the agenda for that aspect of the conference as well as selecting relevant papers for presentation. Gifford, Daito and Bolaños reviewed several papers on financing policies for P3 infrastructure projects that were submitted to the conference.

Gifford moderated a session entitled, “Overall Financing Mechanisms.” The Center also presented two papers: “Renegotation of Transportation Public-Private Partnerships: The U.S. Experience” (Bolaños) and “Understanding the Interaction of Multiple Jurisdictions for Highway Investment: Viability of Public-Private Partnership Alternatives” (Daito).