TRANSPORTATION EVALUATION AND DECISION: THE PROFESSIONAL AND PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION

The paper considers issues arising from contributions of the profession and the public to highway transportation developments, as they are likely to affect planning, design, construction and management for the rest of this century. In the professional sector, the adequacy of current procedures for economic and environmental evaluation are discussed in relation to present and future objectives in engineering practice. The need for more effective engineering input to debates at strategic levels of highway and transportation planning highlights problems associated with current procedures in feasibility studies of competing transportation systems. In the public sector there is active interest at the local plans stages, because affected parties usually comprehend the consequences from land use development and transportation proposals. The need to generate similar public response to the transportation elements of regional structure plans indicates opportunities for more effective methods of assessment of community preferences, communication and presentation of information. The expansion of multi-disciplinary activities is an essential for future highway transportation assessments. A feed-back to highway engineering will be the need for a still wider spectrum of knowledge and technological expertise, which should significantly affect higher education and in-service training of highway and transportation engineers. (a) for abstracts of other papers to the 1975 National Conference of the Institution of Highway Engineers, see IRRD Abstract Nos. 220234-38. /TRRL/