Category: Past Events

November 4, 2015

Mike Schneider, Senior Vice President and Director, Strategic Consulting HDR, Inc., was this month’s Professional Insights guest, meeting with Center students and staff, November 4.

Mr. Schneider leads HDR’s transportation and infrastructure sector, serving as project director or lead technical advisor for a variety of transit, rail and highway engagements. A civil engineer, urban planner, and transport economist whose primary area of expertise is the planning and development of intermodal transportation systems and facilities, Mr. Schneider has worked in more than 20 countries and authored over 100 papers and juried publications in the fields of infrastructure finance, project delivery, management practices and business development. His career spans highway and toll road development, urban and intercity transit and rail, innovative financing programs and P3s, as well as strategic planning for infrastructure investment. In 2007, he received lifetime achievement recognition from the Association of Road and Transportation Builders (ARTBA) for his contributions to the practice and to utilization of P3s in the delivery of transportation infrastructure.

True to Professional Insights series design, students enjoyed first hand interaction with this industry giant, exploring lessons learned and personal observations about their chosen field in casual conversation over pizza and refreshments.

Governor Asa Hutchinson welcomed Arkansas officials to an October Planning Retreat on P3s. Center Director Jonathan Gifford provided a “P3s 101” briefing at the event, which  increased participant’s understanding of public-private partnerships in Arkansas and explored project opportunities in transportation using case studies.

Gifford shared what P3s are (and are not), and when, why and how they can best be used. The presentation included evidence of P3 impacts and a description of what happens when things go wrong (e.g. renegotiations, buy-outs, transfers, defaults and bankruptcies).

To see Dr. Gifford’s slide presentation, click here.

Center Director Jonathan Gifford, PhD, presented a paper at the Fourth Annual International Public-Private Partnership (P3) Symposium hosted by the Cornell Program in Infrastructure Policy (CPIP) in New York on September 15, 2015. The Symposium was sponsored by the Association for the Improvement of American Infrastructure, Public Works Financing Newsletter, Parsons Corporation, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and the University Transportation Research Center – Region II.

The paper, titled “Bankruptcy Policy and Surface Transportation Public-Private Partnerships: A Comparative Analysis of the U.S. and Europe” was co-authored by Gifford and Graduate Research Associates Lisardo Bolanos and Jeong Yun Kweun. “This study explores bankruptcy legal frameworks as an explanation for perceived differences in U.S. surface transportation P3 outcomes compared to the European market. Through six U.S. and eleven European P3 bankruptcy cases, the study provides some evidence that the U.S. legal framework, either Chapter 9 or 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, favors continuous facility operation through debt restructuring rather than asset liquidation.”

In addition to presentations from P3 authorities from all over the world, the 2-day symposium participants toured the Goethals Bridge PPP and participated in roundtable discussions about public perceptions of P3s.

Click here to read the “Bankruptcy Policy and Surface Transportation Public-Private Partnerships: A Comparative Analysis of the U.S. and Europe” paper in full.

Click here to see Professor Gifford’s symposium presentation.

Click here to read a memo written by Professor Gifford, Jeong Yun Kweun and Porter Wheeler entitled, ” Pushback against P3s: The Political Economy of Public-Private Partnerships”.

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.