The impact of roads on the lives of the rural poor in the third world 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 ways. However, it was mainly due to the fact that the roads simply did not make more accessible the places where people wanted to go. People did not become more mobile; perhaps they could not afford it or perhaps transport services did not improve.
The need to situate roads planning within a wider enquiry into the spatial distribution of households, of their destinations and of their ability to get to them without excessive waste of time began to be recognised during the '80's. Time spent in transport is generally time wasted. Although the very poor may not be able to attach much monetary value to it, it remains that, if their day is filled with unproductive activities, there is little hope that their situation will ever improve. Poverty and isolation are intertwined. Roads may part of the solution but only if they provide more mobility.
Two planning tools have been devised fairly recently: Integrated Rural Accessibility Planning (IRAP); and Basic Access provision. Their objective is to formally integrate the factors influencing accessibility within a comprehensive framework to allow tradeoffs amongst them. At the same time, they ensure that choices are made with local participation.
Implementing an accessibility planning approach requires close interdepartmental coordination. However, roads, in common with other sectors, health, water, and education, are normally planned by individual ministries. Communication amongst them of course exists, but not to the point of subordinating budgetary amounts and 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 result in the costs are being shouldered by the communities themselves. This is generally unsustainable since the benefits of roads, as we move down the scale from national, through regional to local, and motor traffic yields to people, bikes and motor bikes, become largely social and non-monetary and must be borne at least partically at higher levels of government through annual subsidies.
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 (which activities will develop because of its presence)? Will the people who most need it be able to afford to use it (and what measures should be taken 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?
For more on accessibility and mobility click
here (pdf)
See also www.gn.apc.org/ifrtd
