The impact of improved roads on the lives of the rural poor in the least-developed countries of Africa and to a far lesser extent Asia has been notoriously modest. In part, this was due to the absence of maintenance. The road simply did not last long enough to change people’s travel habits .Sometimes, even with the road road people were not more mobile; maybe they could not afford the fare or perhaps transport services had not the time to improve.
The need to situate roads planning within a wider inquiry into the spatial distribution of households, their principal destinations and otheir ability to get to them without excessive waste of time began to be recognized during the ’80’s. Time spent in transport is often time wasted. Although the very poor cannot attach much monetary value to their time there is little hope that their situation will ever improve if their day is filled with unproductive activities, .Remember that Poverty and isolation are intertwined. Roads will be part of the solution when they can be shown that they make people more mobile. If not they are a waste of time and money.
Two planning tools have been devised: Integrated Rural Accessibility Planning (IRAP); and Basic Access provision. The first aims to integrate the factors influencing accessibility within an analytic framework to allow tradeoffs among them. The second seeks to improve mobility by prioritizing simple road networks. Both ensure that choices are made locally and not at higher and more remote levels. Planners can evaluate the consequences of community choices and clarify them so that all stakeholders can help to choose their road network in the light of their own priorities.
Planning for improved accessibility and ultimately greater mobility requires close interdepartmental coordination. Roads, in common with other sectors, health, water, and education, are often planned by specialized ministries. They do communicate, but rarely to the point of agreeing to subordinate their own budgetary allocations to that higher level of arbitration centred on accessibility that the approach requires.
The economic and social cost of this fragmentation of responsibility is great. Roads are expensive to build and maintain but their impact on rural poverty is often minimal. Moreover, the modern tendency to promote local participation in the name of good governance can also lead to the costs being off-loaded on the communities themselves who cannot raise all the funds to maintain them. This is generally unsustainable. Costs remain substantial, but the benefits of roads become largely social and non-monetary as we move down the roads hierarchy from national through regional to local, and motor traffic yields to people, bikes and motorbikes.Contributions by higher levels of government through annual subsidies is essential.
For the moment road engineers and planners must take as wide a view as their situation allows. Rather than hunting down more refined ways of selecting roads and speculating on the benefits they may bring, they should reflect, together with the population concerned, on what the road is really for (what present and future activities will develop because of its presence)? Will the people who most need it be able to afford to use it (and what should be done about the means of transport available if they cannot?). Finally, are there cheaper ways to bring users and services closer to each other, such as by building more markets or clinics, for example?
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