GENERATION AND EVALUATION OF RURAL ROAD NETWORKS

Abstract

The social and economic upliftment of a developing country like India can not be achieved without the development of its rural areas where more than three-fourth of its population live. The basic infrastructure required for the development is a well planned road network. In this context rural road network planning assumes much significance. The conventional transport planning technique is urban oriented and is based on trip frequency. This same technique cannot be applied in rural area since the trip frequency in this case is very low and hardly any link will be justified between settlements. The present planning practice being adopted is to connect all settlements having population 1500 and above and 50% of the settlements between population 1000 and 1500 by the year 1990. Although such guide lines suggest specific targets of connectivity of settlements, not much has been said about how to develop optimal linkage pattern among the identified settlements. In the present work a computer aided planning methodology has been developed integrating the rural road with over all development of the area. The planning process has been divided mainly in two parts. In , first part all settlements of the study area are classified into • various hierarchies depending upon their socio-economic levels of development and central places are identified, to iv be linked by road network, based on integrated area development approach. In the second part, a set of alternative road networks are generated incorporating the concepts of basic connectivity network, shortest route distance between settlement pairs, settlement interactions etc. The generated networks are evaluated considering minimum accessibility requirement and overall economy economy derived from the networks. The methodology developed has been applied to generate and evaluate rural road networks in two growth centres of Saharanpur district in U.P. The methodology being computer aided, requires very little manual computations. Also, the network; are generated and displayed, on the screen simultaneously enabling the planner to make a better visual judgement and make his choice.