Publicness in highway projects: A multi-criteria decision-making approach to public-private partnerships

The public-private partnership has emerged as a solution for efficiently implementing highway construction projects. However, PPP tends to focus on profitability, which raises concerns about compromising publicness. This study evaluated the publicness of highway projects by comparing two types, i.e., government-funded and privately-invested. Various performance indicators related to highways were reviewed, and the analytic hierarchy process was employed to estimate publicness scores. Based on expert surveys, five key indicators were selected, i.e., benefit-cost ratio, equity, consistency, toll ratio, and road functional classification. The weights assigned to these indicators were 0.580, 0.121, 0.088, 0.078, and 0.134, respectively. The proposed framework was applied to eight highway projects from the national transport plan in South Korea. Each indicator for the projects was evaluated on a 9-point scale, and the weighted scores were calculated by multiplying each indicator score by the respective weight. The overall publicness score for each project was then determined by summing the weighted scores of the five indicators. The results showed that six projects were estimated to be more beneficial with government funding. Conversely, two projects were estimated to be more beneficial with private investment. The publicness score for each project type was significantly impacted by two indicators, i.e., toll ratio and road functional classification. This framework supports decision-making regarding publicness by incorporating the perspectives of operators, private investors, and users.