Books about Motorways from Amazon.com

Rob van Hoesel was born and raised in the Netherlands, from which Belgium lies between home and all points south, including France, Spain and Italy. In the course of investigating this in-between Pays Trans, he has photographed each of the 35 Belgian highways from his Opel Corsica. Here he arranges 1,000 of those images by route number..
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In A History of British Motorways, Dr Charlesworth presents a fascinating account of the way political and social attitudes concerning motorways have evolved. He describes the early road policies before and between the two World Wars and goes on to cover the building accelerated in the 1960s; however, during the 1970s objections began to be raised on environmental and social grounds. these, coupled with the oil crisis of 1973/4 and the general downturn in the economy, reduced the progress that was being made. As well as describing the inividual motorways in England, Soctland and Wales, with a separate chapter on urban motorways, the author considers the design and planning, usage and socio-economic aspects of motorways..
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This volume raises many challenging and controversial issues surrounding motorway procurement and finance in Europe. A somewhat surprising outcome is that a general appraisal bias can be identified in the following sense: Experts from countries which have introduced concession schemes for managing and financing of their motorways are very critical of these schemes, stressing their shortcomings and caveats. Some even conclude that public management under a regime of welfare maximisation would be desirable as a sustainable option. Experts from countries which have been sticking to public procurement and tax finance of motorways strongly attack the inefficiency of public planning regimes and the general tendency to allocate the revenues from special transport related taxes to the public budget, eventually spending them on other purposes rather than transport. A typical feature of the latter regime seems to be the chronic lack of funds for infrastructure investment.

Although a single ideal country concept for motorway procurement and finance obviously cannot be identified, every paper gives some insights into possible future improvements. Therefore, beyond the rich documentation of national solutions it is the perspective on workable future concepts which makes the book a valuable guide through the jungle of manifold options for public/private partnerships.

This book is a selection of papers presented to the international conference "Highways: Costs and Regulation in Europe", held in Bergamo on the 26th - 27th of November 2004. The Conference was organised by the University of Bergamo, and sponsored by the European Investment Bank..
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