An empirical procedure for enhancing the impact of road investments

The importance of 'needs based planning' is increasingly being recognised by road authorities. Such planning entails allocation of resources to explicitly account for the requirements of the community well into the future. Accomplishing what the community requires of a road system, at least at a level desired by them and ensuring regional equity in meeting community requirements, are two issues that are at the fore-front of needs based planning. This paper demonstrates that, in order to achieve these planning objectives it is necessary to adopt a procedure that can identify road investment proposals with the maximum ability to cost-effectively generate what the community perceive as gain in value to them due to road investment. Using data collected for Western Australia, the paper illustrates that generating investment proposals by commonly used approaches--including conventional multi-criteria analysis--cannot satisfactorily address these issues.