Guidelines for community input in setting level of service and intervention standards for road networks

This report contains guidelines describing a typical community consultation process, and its application to the asset management task of defining suitable levels of service and target or intervention standards for configuration, condition, and performance of an existing road network.These guidelines are based on the premise that community consultation is fundamental to successful road asset management.The community consultation process described in this report has five distinct phases, from initial planning to implementation and review of the outcomes.The guidelines are intended to form a basis for a road agency to ascertain the expectations of local communities for a road network. The guidelines contain two questionnaires used in recent community surveys in Australia and New Zealand.To define suitable levels of service and target standards, stakeholders express their requirements of the network. Stakeholder requirements for each road category are then translated into engineering terms to produce a framework by which road-related assets can be managed.Community consultation provides opportunities for stakeholders to accept different levels of service for different roads, where it is not economically feasible or necessary to maintain the entire road network to the same standards. It is therefore appropriate to divide the road network into a hierarchy of road categories.The guidelines include a glossary of the specific terminology used.