Methodology used in a recent highway construction in Portugal

During the last years, Central and Eastern European countries aimed to increase the participation of the private sector in the construction of new highways and in the development of the transportation network. Presently, public funds are scarce to support the call for transportation infrastructures and the network development in the new EU countries, since projects and the construction of highways involve a high capital investment and an extremely long amortization. So, a possible solution for an adequate risk management of the public funds is the private-public partnerships (PPP), namely through the use of concessions (i.e. construction and exploitation of the public highways network by private entities). One of the European countries which is widely using the concession model in its Road National Strategic Plan is Portugal. This paper is based on the work carried out at the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Minho, within the Highways group, in the frame of “Leonardo da Vinci” Student Mobility Program, Contract RO/2004/PL93209/S, and the main objective is to study the Portuguese experience on the use of the concession model, in order determinate its main advantages and disadvantages. A case study on the use of the concession model was followed for four months during the construction of some new stretches of highways located near Oporto city