Let the Free Market Not Bureaucrats Build Bridges

From 1990 to 2006, the UK financed five times as many public-private partnerships to improve transportation infrastructure as the United States did. With low interest rates and high unemployment, the timing is presumably right to invest in improvements to the United States' decaying transportation infrastructure.

Former director of the Office of Management and Budget Peter Orszag writes in a Bloomberg column that the United States should undertake more public-private partnerships and do them right by auctioning off the project based on the present value of revenue, in the form of user fees, that would be required to undertake the project and allow the winning bidder to collect the fees until that amount is reached.