Do public-private partnerships help improve road safety? Finding empirical evidence using panel data models

Bumjoon Bae and Changbeom Seo

Transport Policy, 2022, vol. 126, issue C, 336-342

Abstract: Despite the not-a-long history of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in South Korea for about 20 years, they play a significant role and share in the highway sector. Road safety is one of the most critical public values in the construction and operation of highways. However, the safety achievement of the PPP projects has not been paid enough attention to and comprehensive and objective evaluation efforts were insufficient. This study investigates the evidence of whether the PPP highways in Korea have experienced a higher degree of road safety compared to the public highways through an empirical analysis. To this end, several crash-frequency prediction models were estimated for all toll highways in the country, including 18 PPP highways opened between 2000 and 2018. The numbers of accidents and casualties, annual traffic volume, and other roadway or PPP-project characteristic data for the five years were collected and organized as unbalanced panel datasets. To account for the unobserved heterogeneity and temporal correlation among the analysis units, i.e., highway segments, panel data models were estimated and compared with cross-sectional models. The modeling results showed that the positive effect of PPPs on road safety in terms of the number of accidents and casualties for the toll highways in Korea exists. The findings of this study offer important policy implications for countries that are pursuing to extend the partnerships with private sectors by helping policymakers to refine or improve the existing PPP policies.

Keywords: Public-private partnerships (PPP); Toll highway; Road safety; Panel data analysis; Fixed effect model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2022.08.006

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