Abstract

Road congestion is a widespread problem across the world. While certain socioeconomic stratum responds better to measures to encourage the use of public transportation, others exhibit an inelastic behavior and remain loyal to their automobiles. Maintenance and expansion of transportation networks are costly and require annual investments that escape the financial abilities of most governments. Under this paradigm, there is a need to implement optimal decision support systems able to allocate scarce financial resources to accomplish reduced congestion and travel time, and that encourages the use of public transportation. To that end, the traditional approach used to handle Pavements and Road Management was extended in both cases to support a linkage to travel demand models illustrated through two case studies: first of a developing country where an attempt to alleviate road congestion is implemented. Secondly, in a city with good levels of Public transportation where poor support has been granted to the traditional bus system, although they provide the main mean of access to MRT and LRT stations. The proposed approach schedules investments on bus routes through measures to handle traffic and to optimize the surface condition of pavements in an attempt to encourage higher levels of bus ridership.