IMPACT OF ROAD MAINTENANCE ON ACCESSIBILITY BENEFITS TO RURAL COMMUNITIES IN INDONESIA

The conventional approach that has been commonly used for rural road investment appraisal focuses mainly on road-users as the main beneficiaries of roads is described in this paper. Road user costs, travel time costs and road agency costs are the main transport cost components considered in conventional road appraisal. The benefits to road users are measured in terms of savings in road user costs, the magnitude of which depends largely on traffic volumes. This approach may not be appropriate for the appraisal of rural roads where traffic volumes are generally low. Other impacts (costs and benefits) of road investment projects on the rural communities should be identified and included in the planning and appraisal of rural roads. For rural people, the need for access to locations or facilities where they can carry out economic or social activities is much more important than benefits such as savings on road user cost which may not be passed down to them from transport operators. Therefore, accessibility benefit impacts need to be included in rural road appraisal, in addition to the road-user impacts. Accessibility benefits are directly related to the condition of road infrastructure. Different levels of road maintenance will impact differently on the accessibility benefits that can be realized by the rural people. In order to model this variation in accessibility benefits with changes in road condition due to different levels of road maintenance strategies, a field survey was conducted on people's travel behavior in three rural districts of Indonesia. A cross-sectional analysis was carried out using the data collected to develop accessibility benefit models. The study aimed to develop a new approach for rural road appraisal that incorporates consideration of both savings in road-user costs and accessibility benefits to the rural community. The new framework developed provides a logical methodology for incorporating accessibility benefits in the economic analysis of road investments, which can be used in Road Management Systems (RMS) such as the Highway Development and Management tools (HDM-4). Applications will include determination of optimum funding allocation and derivation of optimum maintenance standards and strategies for rural roads, which is based on a combined engineering-economic-social approach.