Prioritization methodology for planning new road projects in developing countries

The objective of this paper is to develop an alternate methodology to prioritize new road projects in developing countries for future detailed economic and preliminary engineering studies. To date, an effective and efficient methodology has not been employed and the selection and prioritization of new road projects has largely relied on assumptions rather than a systematic quantification of road project attributes. The proposed methodology is not as complex and sophisticated as those developed for industrialized countries. It is rather designed to efficiently and effectively handle data that are commonly available in developing countries. A hypothetical data set of variables commonly available in studying developing countries for road projects was used to test the proposed methodology. The same data were also used to test five existing methodologies that were developed in industrialized countries for making decisions on projects, investments, strategic plans, etc and comparative analyses were conducted on the results. The proposed methodology produced identical project rankings as the two existing methodologies and closely correlated with the third methodology but was weakly correlated with the fourth methodology. The fifth methodology was found to be the workable given the data set. The alternate methodology was proved to be a valuable screening tool to assist developing countries.