A Model for Planning Highway Investments in Rural Areas: A Case Study for a Region of Southern Italy

This paper focused on the accessibility of rural areas, in which the need to spend in highway projects is dictated not by the intensity of traffic flow, but by the purpose of pursuing a policy of general development in these regions. In this field the usual criteria for the evaluation of highway projects was based on construction and maintenance costs. The authors examined many experiences in developing countries and they verified that besides some conceptual and theoretical formulations, the idea which underlies the usual methodology is the search of maximum economy. This principle does not apply to rural areas of developed States. In this case, the pre-existing of a road network, which is sometimes extensive and diffuse, as well as inadequate and obsolete, the social and economic environment, the type of vehicles used requires the adoption of construction standards similar to those used in the national road system. On this basis, the authors suggest pursuing the objective of maximizing the accessibility of existing, as well as planned activity locations, by the rehabilitation and the integration of the existing network that was affected by the optimal utilization of the available resources. So the identification of priority schemes for investments in the road network is pursued by an optimization technique, in which the objective function is given by an accessibility function. This function has the advantage of including the spatial allocation of activities, and the functional characteristics of the road network and it does not include the traffic flows. The function is well known for the estimation of traffic flows on the links of a network.

• Corporate Authors:

  World Conference on Transport Research Society

  Secretariat, 14 Avenue Berthelot
  69363 Lyon cedex 07,   France 
• Authors:
  • Festa, D C
  • Torrieri, V
• Conference:
  • World Conference on Transport Research: Research for Transport Policies in a Changing World
  • Location: Hamburg , Germany
  • Date: 1983-4-26 to 1983-4-29
• Publication Date: 1983

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Print
• Edition: Volume I and Volume II
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: pp 1111-1122
• Monograph Title: Research for Transport Policies in a Changing World: Proceedings of the World Conference on Transport Research

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Accessibility; Capital investments; Case studies; Development; Policy making; Road construction; Rural areas; Rural highways; Traffic flow; Transportation planning
• Geographic Terms: Italy
• Subject Areas: Construction; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Policy; I52: Construction of Pavements and Surfacings; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01079464
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Oct 22 2007 10:14AM