DEVELOPMENT OF GRAPHICAL INTERFACE FOR RURAL ROAD ACCESSIBILITY PLANNING

Abstract

Majority of residents (over 70%) of developing countries live in rural areas and they are devoid of basic social and economic facilities like health, water, and education due to poor access to these facilities. Number of trips made within and outside the village by rural community depends on its accessibility to the vital services and facilities, so by offering proper mobility and access to rural residents to their basic socio-economic needs, transportation functions as an indispensable cornerstone of overall rural development. Rural Road Accessibility Planning (RRAP) is important in this regard, as RRAP set down the systematic steps to design the rural road network in way that, planned network will provide rural residents better access to essential socio-economic facilities and construction cost of the designed network will also be optimum. In this dissertation work development of user-friendly computerized graphical interface for RRAP using the concepts of Facility Based Rural Planning (FBRNP) Model has been carried out. FBRNP model has an advantage over the other models for rural road network planning since model is free from shortcomings such as adhocism in assuming the parameters, absence of socio-economic parameters and absence of actual trip pattern. The basic objectives of the FBRNP Model are (i) Total cost of the links in the planned network per person served should be minimum (ii) Access distance to the important socio-economic facilities from any village should be within permissible limits. After developing the graphical interface for RRAP using the concepts of FBRNP Model, the main advantages offered by interface are (i) Graphical representation of the optimized network with interactive querying about link and villages is possible (ii) Effective iii handling of database generated through road and household surveys (iii) Flexibility to take on-line decision (iv) Different socio-economic facilities can be considered together for optimization. (v) Interface gives detailed results of the optimization.