Development of an Early-Stage Toll Revenue Estimation Model (UTCM 09-22-02)

With agencies and states increasingly considering tolls as a means to finance transportation infrastructure, there is an increasing need to quickly assess the feasibility of potential tolling projects. In the early stages of a project when an agency--either public or private--merely wants to see the possibility of future traffic and tolled revenues, there still exists a need for a tool to capture basic assumptions and perform preliminary forecasting calculations to see if a project even warrants further examination as a toll road. Both as an early screening tool and as a continuing reasonableness test, this early--stage toll revenue estimation model will allow a user to simultaneously examine the interaction of multiple tolling variables and traffic scenarios so that agencies can make more informed decisions. The authors develop a stand--alone, spreadsheet--based model that prepares early--stage traffic and toll revenue estimates. The model allows users to examine a potential tolled project as a single phase or multiple phases--up to three--then examine the results individually or cumulatively.