Network

Current approaches to national road network planning generally focus on links and corridors in themselves and do not allow the assessment of each link as a component of the network as a whole. This document describes a study to demonstrate the effectiveness of accessibility based techniques for national network planning. Further, it reviews the matter of devising accessibility based network performance measures which can help assess networks in terms of specific policies. (e.g. for particular economic, social or regional development outcomes). Accessibility of one place to all other places is a function of the size and distribution of the other places and of the cost of getting to them. This document describes how the basic accessibility measure can be used to construct a wide variety of performance indicators, and then describes the national road network model constructed to test the techniques and shows the basic accessibility profiles developed using the model. Two performance indicator plots are given, one showing the degree to which the network approaches an idealised network, where every location is directly connected, and one showing the effectiveness of the network in serving a particular location.