Marketing Matters — Why Road Managers Must Communicate the Case for Road Funding

Leaders and managers in the roads sub-sector are, traditionally, technical experts — engineers, IT specialists and others trained in disciplines where problems have long had engineered answers. That makes sense: many of the sub-sector’s challenges do invite technical, and increasingly technological, solutions.

Look more closely, however, and the real challenges faced by road managers are rarely purely technical. They are institutional, organisational, political and — inevitably — financial: the actions taken depend on budget availability and the political priorities of the day, rather than on what a road engineer or manager would choose as the technically “best” option.

This is why, amid so many competing claims on public funds, road managers must make the case for investment — and make it well. The need is especially acute in the roads sub-sector, where decisions take a long time to come to fruition and their effects can ripple across a country’s road network for decades afterwards.

The case is hardest on the most mundane of all road topics: routine maintenance, where funding almost everywhere sits well below what good stewardship requires, often dramatically so. The expensive consequences of this underfunding rarely surface within a single political cycle — and by the time they do, the damage has already been done.

Too often, the sub-sector’s priorities, policies and funding arrangements are decided by people who (quite understandably) have little or no appreciation of the wider implications. In the end, it is the economy — and road users in particular — who pay the price.

Road managers understand, better than anyone, the significant economic — and physical — damage caused by inadequate road maintenance. Every day, they are forced to make sub-optimal decisions because of constraints imposed on them from outside. The tools now exist to quantify objectively, the costs and benefits of the different options on the table. That experience and expertise therefore make road managers the people best placed to argue for better road infrastructure and services. In short, they need to sell the case for sufficient — and more predictable — road funding.

Yet too often these efforts to communicate the issues faced by the sub-sector are sporadic, unpersuasive and ineffective — written by technical experts and weighed down by specialised terminology and abstract concepts that leave wider audiences cold.

Road users, politicians and voters neither understand nor care about “roughness”, “whole-life costs” or “deterioration rates” — still less about “surface treatments” or “slope stability”. What they want are roads that are safe, reliable and accessible, and that allow comfortable travel at reasonable speeds. The art of effective communication is to translate those technical realities into language and ideas the intended audience instinctively grasps — and to keep doing so, consistently, over the long term.

The starting points are straightforward. First, decide what message needs to be sold — and keep it simple. Second, work out exactly who the audience is. Together, these answers shape how the message should be framed, so that it has the greatest impact on the people who matter.

The underlying message may be constant — for example, “provide sufficient long-term funding for well-maintained road infrastructure” — but how it is transmitted and received needs to vary from audience to audience. Private motorists, hauliers, public transport operators and their passengers, politicians and business groups each have their own priorities, perspectives and understanding of the same issue.

Only when that message is widely understood and consistently communicated — and sold — across the wider community can road managers expect road funding to be treated as the priority it needs to be.

Communicating the key concepts and challenges faced by the sub-sector should therefore be a core responsibility for road managers: after all, if they cannot make the case, who will? To achieve this effectively, they need to fund this communication strategy over the long term; and work closely with skilled marketing and public relations specialists, on a sustained, consistent basis, so that the issues that really matter to the sub-sector are not only explained, but genuinely understood by the public they serve, and who (ultimately) fund it. Without that, how can anyone seriously expect support, or funding, to follow?