Consultancy Services

Strategic Advisory for Road Management

When thinking about any activities on roads, it’s natural to think of the most visible bits, especially road construction and maintenance works, or perhaps road design and the contracting process.

These are all essential components for providing suitable and safe road infrastructure to communities and they certainly absorb the biggest share of the funds governments spend on the roads.

But by themselves, they are not enough – there are a lot of other activities going on behind the scenes that are necessary if society is to get the biggest benefits from all that money devoted to these most visible of road activities. Indeed, although all these other, less obvious areas together cost just a small fraction of the construction costs for new roads, failing to carry out these other behind-the-scenes activities well often has an enormous effect on how effectively these more expensive activities are carried out. The costs of ignoring these other areas is enormous, but so too can be the benefits from doing them well.

This makes them highly cost-effective. As a rough guide, for every dollar spent on better road management, societies should expect to save about 3 dollars in their road transport costs. Obviously, this varies from one situation to the next, but it is indicative of just how important good road management is – and what excellent value for money it is for governments and road users.

I don’t do these more visible of road activities: if you want a road designed/engineered, built or supervised, there are many other highly competent engineering consulting and contracting companies out there.

Instead, I focus on many of these other important areas necessary to manage our roads well, areas that are frequently overlooked, ignored or not appreciated in many countries and on many development projects.

Key Areas Of Expertise

1. Institutional Arrangements

Who should be responsible for doing what road functions?
What should be the key activities for the private sector and public sector?
What basic principles should be considered when designing suitable institutional arrangements? What are the roles for the different public sector institutions, such as the Ministry for Transport or Public Works, the Ministry for Finance, and other institutions involved in the roads sub-sector?
Should there be a Road Authority or Agency, and/or Road Fund that are separate or part of other institutions?
What should be their responsibilities and monitoring mechanisms? How should can they best work together to protect everybody’s best interests and to minimise tricky conflicts of interest?
What should be the interfaces between the different institutions involved, including (but not limited to) managing the funds available?
What should be the balance between national and local issues?
What should be the legal and regulatory requirements in order to reflect the preferred institutional arrangements?
How should they be regulated, monitored and assessed?
What checks and balances are necessary?
What role (if any) should the various road user groups play in the management of the roads they use?
How should each institution report (account) for its performance, and to whom?

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2. Organisational Issues

How should each institution best be structured?
What is the most appropriate organisational structure (e.g. at the national and local levels)?
How many local or regional offices should there be?
What should be the allocation of responsibilities (functions) between the different parts of the organisation?
What resources are necessary (skills, equipment and budgets) for the different parts of the organisation to perform optimally?
What information (and hence, management systems) is required to manage and monitor the various parts of the organisation?
What metrics (e.g. KPIs) should be used by whom, to help with this oversight and monitoring?

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3. Policy Formulation

How can the needs and interests of road users best be balanced within a broader multi-modal transport framework?
How should the roads sub-sector best respond to a government’s broader policy objectives (e.g. environmental sustainability, economic development or social inclusion)?
What are the cost/budget implications for the various policy objectives and how can these best be measured and monitored?

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4. Funding Arrangements

How much funding is necessary?
Where should these funds come from?
What activities should be included?
Who should pay for the construction and maintenance of the various parts of the public road network?
How much should they pay: what principles should be used?
What should be the balance between charges on different road user groups and taxation?
What should be the role of the Ministry for Finance?
How to accommodate changing needs (e.g. increasing and changing traffic levels) an unforeseen requirements (e.g. emergency works)?
What arrangements are necessary to collect, manage, disburse and monitor the funds?
What should be the correct balance between national and local interests?
What metrics (e.g. KPIs) should the used to measure how well the funding of roads is administered and set up?

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5. Network Planning & Budgeting

How much money is needed to maintain the existing road network assets, at both a national and local level?
How does this compare to existing (and historic and projected) budget allocations?
What should be the maintenance standards applied for the different parts (and types) of road assets?
What are the cost/budget implications of these varying standards?
Is there any ‘maintenance backlog’, how big is this and how can it be cleared?
What are the implications on the future condition of the road assets, from changing budget levels?
What are the total road transport costs involved (i.e. including road user costs)?
What are the economic returns and benefit-cost ratios from different activities and timings?
What treatment should be used, what are their costs and implications on the future performance of the road assets?
What are the budgetary implications from uncertainty in the planning processes (i.e. sensitivity testing)?

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6. Communication Issues

What are the organisation’s capability to communicate with its external stakeholders? How can these be improved to be more effective?
Who are these external stakeholders and what do they want to know?
What issues matter to them and how best to communicate your organisation’s messages to them?
What are your organisation’s key messages?
What methods should an organisation use to most effectively communicate with the different stakeholder groups?
How to manage and monitor your organisation’s communications strategy?
At an individual level, what techniques and approaches can be used to make individual communications far more effective and provide maximum impact?

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7. Other Areas Covered

Axle load controls
Road safety issues
Contract Management

I can help governments and road organisations answer key questions about these areas, such as:

How can these be made to be more effective?
What are the causes of existing weaknesses?
What should be the institutional, legislative and organisational arrangements?
How should these activities be funded and how much is needed?
How to monitor the effectiveness of these measures?
How to best promote the importance of these issues to non-technical audiences?

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