A GIS Approach to Identify Road Network Improvement Needs

Moving from one place to another has become a major concern in today's context. On one hand there is an increasing financial requirement due to cost of vehicles and escalating fuel price, and on the other hand there is traffic congestion thereby increasing the time spent on the road which is considered as unproductive. One of the most important problems that should be looked at by today's leaders, managers, planners, etc., is the improvements that need to be made to the road network in order to reduce wastage of time, fuel and other valuable resources. In this context it is of great importance for the decision-makers to identify the problem causing area to provide attention by means of prioritizing suitable actions, such as road surface improvements, expanding the carriageway or by providing alternative paths. GIS is a tool which provides opportunities for the rational identification of planning and management alternative utilizing Geographic data and managerial experiences. In this work spatial accessibility of Kaduwela area in the outskirts of Colombo is identified using a simple GIS model which incorporates spatial variation of roads, road condition and population in the context of road network accessibility and road service accessibility. Model results indicates the options for improvements to particular pathways in a priority sequence so that, a manager could identify a temporal sequence to provide attention to relevant spatial extents and identify the improvements to the entire geographic area. An Affected Road Index (ARI) is computed for each of the GN divisions. The present work used ArcGIS software with spatial data of 1: 50,000 scale to carryout a multilayer GIS analysis to demonstrate the strength of GIS applications in carrying out spatial resource management for the reduction of road congestion.