2014R02EN I Road infrastructure provides a fundamental foundation to the performance of all natio... more 2014R02EN I Road infrastructure provides a fundamental foundation to the performance of all national economies, delivering a wide range of economic and social benefits. Adequately maintaining road infrastructure is essential to preserve and enhance those benefits. The importance of maintenance needs to be recognised by decision makers, funded appropriately and well managed to ensure maximum value is achieved. Inadequate levels of investment or poor management of the road network will have serious consequences for economies and social well-being. This paper makes the case for the importance of road maintenance by drawing on robust evidence from around the world. Roads are key national assets which underpin economic activity Roads are significant national assets. Roads are the internationally dominant transport asset, comprising millions of kilometres across the world (e.g. the average length of public roads in OECD countries is more than 500,000 km). Roads are often the single largest publicly owned national asset. It is road maintenance that controls the depreciation in value and determines the impacts of the network on road users and society. Without proper maintenance the high value of any road network can be quickly eroded and road users and society can experience significant adverse impacts if a road network is in poor condition. Road transport is a foundation for economic activity. Based purely on the value added by commercial transport services, a widely quoted measure is that road transport typically lies between 3% and 5% of GDP. However this ignores a number of other considerations (e.g. inputs of fuel and transport equipment and infrastructure) which, if taken into account, suggest the contribution of transport to GDP is more realistically between 10% and 20%. Data provided by the International Transport Forum (OECD countries plus other countries such as China, India and Russia) suggests that for all surface passenger transport, road transport accounts for 83% of passenger travel. Ageing infrastructure requires increased road maintenance. The need for maintenance increases as road infrastructure ages, since it becomes more fragile, less resilient and journeys are more susceptible to disruption. There is a lag between building new roads and their need for maintenance. For countries with mature road networks, much of the road building happened in the second half of the twentieth century. Large structures such as bridges and overpasses typically have design lives around 100 years and so on many networks, the full realisation of the long term ongoing maintenance need will not yet have been reached. For example, in 2011, 9% of Japan's 160,000 bridges were 50 years old or more and, at the current replacement rate, this will rise to 53% in 2031 as the bridge stock ages. Traffic volumes continue to grow and drive an increased need for maintenance. As traffic levels grow, the need for maintenance is only increased. Even for many developed countries, where the long term rate of traffic growth has slowed, attempts to maximise capacity on congested networks and to maintain mobility at higher traffic flows have led to use of increasingly complex assets to ease traffic flow. Such assets require more frequent interventions on the network and drive increased maintenance costs. With the low rates of growth in network length in these countries, the expectation would therefore be that maintenance becomes a larger share of the total spend on the road infrastructure. However, there is evidence that this is not happening in the last years.
2014R02EN I Road infrastructure provides a fundamental foundation to the performance of all natio... more 2014R02EN I Road infrastructure provides a fundamental foundation to the performance of all national economies, delivering a wide range of economic and social benefits. Adequately maintaining road infrastructure is essential to preserve and enhance those benefits. The importance of maintenance needs to be recognised by decision makers, funded appropriately and well managed to ensure maximum value is achieved. Inadequate levels of investment or poor management of the road network will have serious consequences for economies and social well-being. This paper makes the case for the importance of road maintenance by drawing on robust evidence from around the world. Roads are key national assets which underpin economic activity Roads are significant national assets. Roads are the internationally dominant transport asset, comprising millions of kilometres across the world (e.g. the average length of public roads in OECD countries is more than 500,000 km). Roads are often the single largest publicly owned national asset. It is road maintenance that controls the depreciation in value and determines the impacts of the network on road users and society. Without proper maintenance the high value of any road network can be quickly eroded and road users and society can experience significant adverse impacts if a road network is in poor condition. Road transport is a foundation for economic activity. Based purely on the value added by commercial transport services, a widely quoted measure is that road transport typically lies between 3% and 5% of GDP. However this ignores a number of other considerations (e.g. inputs of fuel and transport equipment and infrastructure) which, if taken into account, suggest the contribution of transport to GDP is more realistically between 10% and 20%. Data provided by the International Transport Forum (OECD countries plus other countries such as China, India and Russia) suggests that for all surface passenger transport, road transport accounts for 83% of passenger travel. Ageing infrastructure requires increased road maintenance. The need for maintenance increases as road infrastructure ages, since it becomes more fragile, less resilient and journeys are more susceptible to disruption. There is a lag between building new roads and their need for maintenance. For countries with mature road networks, much of the road building happened in the second half of the twentieth century. Large structures such as bridges and overpasses typically have design lives around 100 years and so on many networks, the full realisation of the long term ongoing maintenance need will not yet have been reached. For example, in 2011, 9% of Japan's 160,000 bridges were 50 years old or more and, at the current replacement rate, this will rise to 53% in 2031 as the bridge stock ages. Traffic volumes continue to grow and drive an increased need for maintenance. As traffic levels grow, the need for maintenance is only increased. Even for many developed countries, where the long term rate of traffic growth has slowed, attempts to maximise capacity on congested networks and to maintain mobility at higher traffic flows have led to use of increasingly complex assets to ease traffic flow. Such assets require more frequent interventions on the network and drive increased maintenance costs. With the low rates of growth in network length in these countries, the expectation would therefore be that maintenance becomes a larger share of the total spend on the road infrastructure. However, there is evidence that this is not happening in the last years.
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