New Approaches to Ownership, Administration and Management of Low Volume Roads

Low volume roads comprise about 80 percent of the total road network, but serve only 20% of the traffic, or less. This causes a difficult problem for owning, administering, managing and financing this large road and important network. The paper explores various options for approaching these issues. The private sector is the presumed supplier for maintenance, rehabilitation, or construction. In the Scandinavian countries the (very) low volume roads are privately owned by the beneficiaries. Because the traffic volumes are low, the beneficiaries can be easily identified and organize themselves as a Private Road Association (PRA), a legal entity, and responsible for maintaining the road with or without state subsidies. Studies show that PRAs maintain their roads at half the cost of the corresponding public roads. The paper is based on an assignment from the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications. Its starting point was the PRA legislation, forty years old and no longer synchronous with the developments in society, road management and economics. The paper presents three concepts for owning private low volume roads: public, association, co-operative, and corporative ownership. Each of these legal ways have advantages and disadvantages. The paper discusses, evaluates and compares the different concepts from several points of view, including: responsibility and liability; administration and decision making; voice of users and other affected interests; user charges and payments; financial management and audits; taxation; government subsidies; costs of road maintenance; beneficiary attractiveness; training requirements; and, legal development.

• Corporate Authors:

  World Conference on Transport Research Society

  Secretariat, 14 Avenue Berthelot
  69363 Lyon cedex 07,   France 
• Authors:
  • Sirvio, Esko
  • Talvitie, Antti
• Conference:
  • 10th World Conference on Transport Research
  • Location: Istanbul , Turkey
  • Date: 2004-7-4 to 2004-7-8
• Publication Date: 2004

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 19p
• Monograph Title: 10th World Conference on Transport Research

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Corporations; Highway departments; Highway maintenance; Highway transportation; Low volume roads; Management; Ownership; Private roads; Public roads; Roads; Traffic volume
• Subject Areas: Administration and Management; Finance; Highways; I10: Economics and Administration;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01085069
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jan 28 2008 8:15AM