Roads are frequently cited as a public good even though economists have shown that privatizing the roads would solve some of the problems endemic to public roads, namely, high accident rates, congestion, and pollution (see Roth 1996, 1967; Block 1983, 1979, 1980). Economists have analyzed the problem of externalities and shown how the effects of freerider behavior can be contained. The question...

Road mortality is thought to be a leading cause of turtle population decline. However, empirical evidence of the direct negative effects of road mortality on turtle population abundance is lacking. The purpose of this study was to provide a strong test of the prediction that roads reduce turtle population abundance. While controlling for potentially confounding variables, we compared relative a...

Roads affect animals in three adverse ways. They act as barriers to movement ('fence effect'), enhance mortality due to collisions with traffic, and decrease habitat size. We study the relative importance of the first two effects using a spatially explicit individual-based model of population dynamics. We discuss our results with respect to the suitability of fences along roads as a measure to ...

Good characterization of traffic interactions among urban roads can facilitate traffic-related applications, such as traffic control and short-term forecasting. Most studies measure the traffic interaction between two roads by their topological distance or the correlation between their traffic variables. However, the distance-based methods neglect the spatial heterogeneity of roads’ traffic int...