IBTTA Marks Infrastructure Week with Highway Investment Webinar

Happy Infrastructure Week!

With Infrastructure Week in full swing, tomorrow, Tuesday, May 15, IBTTA and AASHTO are hosting an all-star lineup for a webinar on The State of Highway Investment: Plans, Promises and Predictions. It runs from 11:00 AM to 12:00 noon ET.  It isn’t too late to sign up. It is free, but you need to register to receive the link to the webinar.

IBTTA Executive Director and CEO Pat Jones, Jim Tymon, Chief Operating Officer of the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO), and Weifeng Zhong, Research Fellow, Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, will talk about where things stand today with highway infrastructure investment in the United States, and what to expect in the months ahead.

The subject matter is as current and compelling as the day’s headlines. And the timing could not be better. This year’s Infrastructure Week takes place at a time when legislators and transportation policy analysts are looking for a pathway to a national infrastructure program before policy-making must take a back seat to mid-term elections in the fall.

If anyone logs on to the webinar looking for quick, practical, proven solutions, they’ll quickly realize they’ve come to the right place. A sample of 31 IBTTA member agencies reported five billion trips and transactions in 2015, an increase of 328 million in just 12 months. Of the 31 that responded to an IBTTA survey, 23 reported record years, and all but one had seen year-over-year growth.

With more and more states looking for viable highway funding solutions, and new managed lane projects opening across the country, currently 46, there’s strong data showing travel on tolled facilities continues to grow at a record rate.

While Tuesday’s webinar focuses on the highway funding and financing approach that IBTTA knows best, the tolling industry has always been committed to advancing a full toolbox of funding options to clear the country’s massive highway infrastructure investment deficit.

“There’s an urgent need to bring our country’s highways, bridges, and tunnels up to a state of good repair,” Jones said last month, when IBTTA first announced the webinar. “It’s a big, essential, expensive job. To get it done, we should be deploying every reliable funding source at our disposal. And that means clearing the obstacles for state and local governments to use tolling when it’s the right solution for the projects on their priority lists.”

Attend IBTTA’s Infrastructure Week webinar by registering here, The State of Highway Investment: Plans, Promises and Predictions, May 15 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 noon Eastern Time.