The Transportation Transition: Visioning an Autonomous, Congestion-Free Road Network
Both traffic congestion and traffic safety remain pervasive global problems. However, technologies that exist today allow for a new transport system that is safe, energy efficient, reliable, and congestion free. This seminar outlines new approaches to creating time-and-location specific markets in road use. When properly designed, those markets will eradicate traffic congestion along with its massive social harms. Our market design for road use builds congestion pricing and models of efficient pricing in the electricity sector. The market maximizes the value of a transport network through efficient scheduling, routing, and pricing of road use. On the supply side, transparent price information provides essential information for efficient long-term investment in transport. The creation of a “missing market” in road use forms the foundation for a new, subscription-based transport system that is fully autonomous, safe, and reliable.
Bio: Rick Geddes is a professor in Cornell’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and professor of economics at Cornell. He is Founding Director of the Cornell Brooks Center for Infrastructure. Rick is a member of the graduate fields of systems engineering, regional science, and economics. He is concurrently a Non-Resident Senior Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Previously, Rick was a U.S. Presidential appointee as a Commissioner on the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission and a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Rick has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles on a wide variety of topics. His research centers on the funding, financing and delivery of major infrastructure projects, road pricing, and utility regulation, among other topics. His publications have appeared in leading academic journals including Nature, the American Economic Review, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law & Economics, and Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, among many others. He is author of the 2011 AEI book entitled, The Road to Renewal: Private Investment in U.S. Transportation Infrastructure. Rick holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Chicago, and a B.S. in economics and finance from Towson State University.