本文从以下几个方面对发展中国家的农村道路规划提出了建议：
1. 选择最适宜于当地需求的公路类型等级
2. 设计最适于当地交通流量和运输的道路
3. 施工技术的选择
4. 确定良好的养护队伍，确信他们拥有相关的专业知识和资金来源
5. 案例分析
Planning Rural Roads in developing countries

The need to build or improve as many rural roads as possible to the best technical standards went unquestioned by governments and donors until recently. Justification was often seen as a troublesome formality and evaluation models were valued more for their complicity than their rigour.

It was implicitly assumed that a pent-up demand was out there which would generate ever-growing numbers of larger vehicles or even that somehow development would spontaneously come into being once the road was built. It usually did not. Now too many rural roads, built to high standards, are little used if not closed, since little money was left to maintain the extensive and high quality networks.
We should now look more closely at the conditions which determine the viability and sustainability of rural roads. They are just one of many ways of providing mobility to make services more accessible but many requirements must be satisfied if they are to be used by those who most need them. Ignoring accessibility questions will continue to lead to unused roads and wasted funds. Again, for a road to be sustainable, its maintenance must be undertaken by those who have the knowledge, funds and motivation to carry it out. Conditions that guarantee that maintenance will be done, managed and paid for must be put in place.
The lessons have been learned and we need not dwell on them. Nevertheless, diffusion of new approaches is proving to be slow and erratic. Planning of rural roads is often still centred in public works departments who do not have the mandate or incentive to widen their range of questioning beyond the technical choices

Selecting those roads which best meet local needs
When needs are great and resources limited, screening methods are necessary to make sure that only the roads with the greatest impact are built. They must not be too costly to apply in proportion to the investment involved, nor should they be so complicated that no one understands how they work.
Roads selected should also form a coherent and sustainable core network, that is one which provides accessibility to as many people as possible within the inevitably limited maintenance budget. Roads already in maintainable condition should be a priority, as the marginal cost of their deterioration is far greater than the cost of maintenance.
Selection methods range from a single-criterion index of benefit, preferably monetary, which can be directly compared with the investment, to those which attempt to copy the complexity of real-life situations by incorporating many indices of need and potential impact, such as poverty reduction indices. Afterwards they may sometimes be collapsed into a single one using a weighting system reflecting the values of the investors and hopefully the beneficiaries. The multiplication of variables, although seductive, tends to render the selection procedure rather opaque and difficult to understand. An alternative is provided by the Basic Access approach, which attacks isolation explicitly by defining a minimal level of access to motor transport to which all inhabitants have at least a theoretical right.
Selection procedures differ also as to the level at which they are defined and applied. It may be nationally, to ensure a consistent and equitable allocation of funds among regions, locally, in collaboration with road users and beneficiaries, or at both levels, as in the basic access approach.
Robust methods have been developed, such as HDM, to evaluate major road programs where savings to road users are high in proportion to the investment and their future behavior faced with an upgraded road reasonably predictable. However, the impact of rural roads is difficult not only to foresee but to express in monetary terms that can be directly compared to the cost. In such cases, it is better to forget what are often futile attempts at quantification and rely on local participation, not only for information, but to play a major role in programming. This does not exclude either the use of objective criteria or the participation of higher levels of government, particularly if they are investors. However, it is important that choices be made within an egalitarian process of negotiation where all participants agree upon the selection criteria and understand and accept the consequences of applying them.

Designing rural roads good enough for the traffic using them

We all want roads and good ones. The Romans were perhaps the only civilisation who succeeded in having their cake and eating it. Their roads were horribly expensive, but robust and extensive. Since then, to further entwine ourselves in culinary metaphors, we have had to put water in our wine. Western civilisation had first of all to rediscover how to design and build roads that were durable and economical. We are now faced with the problem of choosing the "good-enough road", in other words, the best for a given situation. If a road is under-designed, it will not fully exploit the benefits from improved service to users. Furthermore, it could be unstable and difficult to maintain under the combined assault of weather and traffic. If, on the other hand, it is over-designed, it will mop up funds that could be used for other roads. Also, it will be costly to maintain to a high standard. Finally,destruction of the natural environment will be more severe.
The ideal level of service to be provided should be determined pragmatically. Although road engineers have a natural inclination towards fixed national standards, these are most useful when they can be justified relative to the vehicle operating savings they induce. Many models exist for such analyses. Their applicability becomes more and more questionable when savings are small relative to the cost of the road. In this indeterminate zone, where the impact of a road depends on the unpredictable reactions of small numbers of people, cost minimisation is a prudent strategy.
The choice of road quality and the technical characteristics of the road which will best provide it is a compromise between technical and cost considerations, a natural desire for comfort and mobility, and the willingness and capacity to pay for it. This in turn depends mainly on the numbers of users. Engineers should determine what technical specification is most appropriate, given usage, terrain and weather. (see also low cost road surfaces). Environmental degradation should also be minimised. Others should work with the future users to determine what they really want, once they are confronted with the options and their costs and armed with the information to make an informed choice amongst them.

Choice of construction technology
The core activity of road construction consists of lifting and moving large quantities of earth over varying distances, from a few meters to up to a kilometer or more. Technological advance has provided workers with increasingly powerful tools for lifting, transporting, spreading and shaping earth and gravel. This mechanisation of construction, involving the replacement of shovels, wheelbarrows and animal carts, by bulldozers, scrapers, graders and trucks and of course, methods to deploy them, required about fifty years, and was essentially terminated before the Second World War. It was stimulated by the scarcity and rising costs of labour, by the need to undertake large infrastructure projects within short periods of time, and advances in engine and power transmission design. Road construction technology is now mature, aimed to maximise the productivity of labour costing 20 USD per hour and more. The problem is that construction conditions today in many developing countries have little in common with those which stimulated technological development. Labour was in fact scarce and relatively expensive for a while in the 1950’s (for example, 0,60 USD per day in Ghana or about 12 USD in today’s purchasing power) so the desire to rapidly modernise infrastructure in the newly independent countries forced the perhaps premature importation of mechanised methods. Rapid population growth has now rendered labour abundant and real wages have shrunk. They are rarely more than a few dollars per day, far below that prevailing even at the turn of this century when the substitution of machinery for labour was most rapid. Furthermore road projects in rural areas are small and remote. Heavy equipment is expensive to mobilise, difficult to deploy and subject to excessive downtime due to delays in obtaining spares and fuel. Finally, machinery, parts, and fuel require foreign exchange which could be better spent on vital imports. It is really rather absurd to continue to invest in labour-saving technology in developing countries. For this reason construction techniques have been developed during the past twenty years or so which substitute labour for machinery when it is feasible to do so. This does not mean a return to pre-mechanised techniques. Rather the use of technical ingenuity to seek an appropriate mixture while drawing on modern site management techniques to deploy them effectively. The diffusion of labour-based methods has not been easy. Modern construction technology is well-mastered in most countries while new methods, involving the management of a much larger labour force, require training. Large equipment fleets often already exist, although in varying states of disrepair, whose low productivity due to frequent breakdowns as well as their need for eventual replacement are often ignored in comparing costs. Accepting new techniques requires open mindedness and willingness to learn among the engineers who must apply it. It also requires the political will to resist pressure from vested interests and make the best use of the human resources they have at their disposal.

Ensuring that knowledge and funds will be available to those who manage and maintain them

The organisation of road maintenance has a long and chequered history. Who should maintain them and who should pay for it was debated in the UK since the sixteenth century and was only finally resolved at the beginning of the twentyth. At the outset, management was decentralised, but those made responsible at the parish level had neither the knowledge, the motivation or the money to keep the roads in order. Gradually, glaring contradictions were corrected but massive privatisation of road management, relying on user financing, imposed itself as an intermediate solution in the UK, leading eventually to the mixed public and private hierarchies of today. In France, management was highly centralised and relatively effective, although the reliance on forced labour was, to put it mildly, unpopular. In North America, the desire for mobility in rural areas resulted in the private and fragmented responsibility for rural roads gradually giving way to public control, since only thus could adequate motorable roads be built and maintained. Road management in the developing world has also seen as many reversals but on a shorter time scale. In fact the more or less organic if hesitant growth from local to national responsibility over hundreds of years is happening in reverse. At first the state enthusiastically accepted responsibility but conspicuously failed to raise the funds to maintain networks that grew exponentially; donors manifested much more enthusiasm for funding their construction. Now, mainly because of donor pressures, decentralized management and financing, together with the use of labor-based methods to efficiently use local resources, are gaining acceptance. However, the perennial problems of lack of knowledge, motivation and funds have not disappeared. Decentralised maintenance management is intimately linked with road design, selection procedures and technology choice. Also it cannot be separated from the vital question as to whether a road is necessary in the first place. Even simple roads are very expensive to maintain in rural areas and every effort must be made to concentrate on carefully selected core networks while relying on local resources as much as possible. Management should involve those who participated in selecting the roads in the first place since if they have no voice they are unlikely to contribute. Training is vital since management and technical and entrepreneurial capabilities are lacking in rural areas. For this reason, the management of rural roads, even when decentralised, must be integrated within a larger national program. Only then can the public sector be an effective participant and the private construction sector find the markets necessary to its survival.

Larimer County, the Fort Collins Soil Conservation District and the Big Thompson Soil Conservation District have joined together in preparing "The Landowner’s Guide to Private Access Road Construction in Larimer County, Colorado". This guide outlines the process of constructing a private access road from the pre-construction planning phase, through design considerations, to revegetation and maintenance issues. While the file is quite large (about 1.7 MB in pdf format) it is filled with lots of good information to help you build a good road. "It is always less expensive to build a good road the first time than to build a bad road over each year". Copies of this guide are available from the Larimer County Engineering Department and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
The Board of Larimer County Commissioners adopted an addition to the Larimer County Road Manual, on July 19, 1999. The addition, Appendix G-Design and Construction Standards for Private Local Access Roads, defines requirements and guidelines for design and construction of private roads in Larimer County. The newly added standards took effect on August 23, 1999. This document is in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format.
Rural road construction and building site excavation can be a challenge, particularly in the foothills and mountain areas. Larimer County intends to promote a pro-active approach with citizens wishing to develop rural properties by providing advice and resources to help them during the planning stages of the development. The intent is to help land owners develop their property in such a way that their development rights are respected and the resulting roads and excavations are safe, functional, and disturb the least amount of the landscape possible.
Appendix G defines detailed minimum requirements for private local access roads throughout the county. These minimum requirements address emergency access, proper storm water design, control of erosion from the area disturbed by the construction, and protection of water quality. The standards are incorporated into Larimer County Road Manual. Roads intended to access more than one residence or parcel (multiple access roads) are regulated through a permitting and inspection process. Fees are assessed on the basis of the number of site visits by the County official reviewing the plans for the road(s) and for final inspection. Roads/driveways accessing a single residence (single access roads) are not regulated. Guidelines for construction of single access roads are included in Appendix G and landowners are encouraged to use these guidelines to plan and construct the road accessing their residence. Single access roads can be certified by the County as being built to the minimum standards. This can be accomplished through the same permitting and inspection process as used for regulated roads.
Increasing development in the rural areas of Larimer County has raised some concerns among the citizens of the County. People continue to move here to take advantage of the thriving economy and to enjoy the abundant natural resources and relaxed lifestyle. The concerns are based upon the potential for degradation of the very aspects of Larimer County that make it so popular. If the development is not well planned, more visible scars will appear on our hillsides. Wildlife habitat may be threatened or diminished. Emergency access may be hindered or impossible if roads into rural properties are not well engineered and constructed properly. This could threaten other private properties or public lands if fire occurs. The overall effect can be very negative or it can be minimized by adequate planning.

　　专题：农村公路