The Quality of Road Service - "Evaluation, Perception and Response Behaviour of Road Users"

The quality of service is defined as the capability of a product or a service to meet the needs of its beneficiaries (users, residents, elected representatives, road owners and operators, etc.). Their expectations may vary from one country to another depending on specific cultural and socio-economic contexts and it is the policy makers' responsibility to set quality objectives consistent with those contexts. The paper differentiates between two main types of indicators. On the one hand, technical [...]

Planning & Budgeting on Road Network Level - Presentation of Budgets for Decision-Makers

The maintenance of road networks is becoming increasingly important. For this reason we must seek to employ new management systems. Construction and maintenance of public roads are paid by taxpayers. Fundamentally the taxpayer (the road user) has financial responsibility for the system - their interests need to be taken into consideration. The public wants decision-making to be transparent and has the possibility to control the system. The issue as a whole can be seen in the fact that all steps [...]

The Role of Economic and Socio-economic Models in Road Management

In a context where the Public Administrations experience a stronger and stronger demand on social policy, and where road budgets, especially road maintenance budgets, tend to be tightened or even scaled back, the economic evaluation - and optimization - of road maintenance actions and/or policy becomes a recurrent requirement. There is, therefore, a growing need for methods and tools to meet this requirement. The development of such tools implies a number of technical obstacles, including: [...]

Whole Life Costing of Roads - Flexible Pavements

The objective of the Road Technology Topic Area set out in the 1995-1999 PIARC Strategic Plan is "to improve the provision, maintenance and performance of road infrastructure in accordance with international best practice". One of the essential requirements to meet this objective is a means of assessing the relative merits of the various forms of construction and of the maintenance processes. This can be done by considering the costs and the performance of the materials and processes used over an [...]

Whole-Life Costing of Roads - Concrete Roads

In 1996, PIARC Technical Committee on Concrete Roads (C7) created a subcommittee on the theme "Whole Life Costing (WLC)". On the basis of a broad view over the subject, based on the existing WLC systems in Sweden and UK (COMPARE), two questionnaires were drawn and issued in 1997. The result of the questionnaires shows that many countries are very interested in this subject, and also that many countries use whole life costing as a basis for decisions about road design and guidelines for the national [...]