Other Infrastructure Study
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Publication
Enhancing Burkina Faso Regional Connectivity: An Economic Corridor Approach
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12)Regional integration and international connectivity via economic corridors play an essential role in reducing the isolation of West Africa’s landlocked countries such as Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso’s main international corridors are the Ouagadougou-Lomé road corridor connecting it to Togo, the Ouagadougou-Tema (Ghana) road corridor, and the Ouagadougou-Niamey (Niger) road corridor, as well as the Ouagadougou-Abidjan (Cote d’Ivoire) road and rail corridors. Each of the corridors plays a unique role in regional integration, national trade, and sub-national rural and urban development, by providing connectivity to consumption centers, economic production zones, and/or economically lagging areas. The national perspective suggests that the Ouagadougou-Lomé corridor is very important for Burkina Faso’s imports, serving as the artery for about 40 percent of all cargo entering the country, while the Ouagadougou-Abidjan road and rail corridors play an equally crucial role in allowing Burkina Faso’s exports to reach global markets. The region’s trunk road infrastructure is in fair-to-good condition on most sections, although large gaps remain on corridors such as the eastern link between Lomé and Niamey. This study develops several scenarios of corridor interventions that address the inefficiencies to quantify the expected impacts in terms of real income growth and domestic market accessibility. -
Publication
Tunisia Infrastructure Diagnostic
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-12)Tunisia’s has made significant investments in infrastructure, which has contributed to economic growth. The investments have enabled reasonably good access to basic infrastructure services. While access rates are high, the relative quality of Tunisia’s infrastructure has deteriorated significantly over the last ten years. State-owned enterprises (SOEs), which dominate the infrastructure sector, receive considerable subsidies and incur notable financial losses. Overall, there is a heavy reliance on external borrowing to fund infrastructure investment, which creates contingent liabilities, and enhances foreign exchange and macro-economic risk. Chapter one provides an overview of Tunisia’s infrastructure performance; chapter two discusses each sub-sector in more detail in terms of achievements and challenges; chapter three looks at historical trends in spending followed by a scenario analysis of investment needs with anecdotal examples, and discusses the present macro-economic and fiscal constraints; and chapter four presents possible action items for further discussion with the Tunisian government. -
Publication
A Brief Overview on the Road Safety Approach in Singapore
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10)The report introduces how the Safe System Approach works, with a focus on road infrastructure and road safety engineering best practices from one of the best performing countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Singapore. Singapore roads are not only considered the safest in the region, they rank among the safest globally. Road safety management rules and regulations implemented in the country have resulted in significant strides in managing the effects of collision factors related to roadway design, human behavior, and vehicle attributes. As a result, road safety statistics have shown that fatalities on the Singapore road network have been steadily declining over the past decade. This is leading to a desire on the part of neighboring countries to follow Singapore's example and learn from its experience. In order to mitigate collisions attributed to vehicle inadequacies or defects, one of the measures taken in Singapore was to enforce a strict vehicle import policy. Vehicle imports are permissible from countries that have adopted and comply with recognized high vehicle safety standards. Vehicle safety compliance is particularly focused on 52 items specified by the Land Transport Authority (LTA). In addition to strict vehicle import standards, Singapore enforces a strict vehicle quota system, which regulates the number of vehicles on the road network. Additionally, vehicles are required to undergo frequent inspections. Cars between 3 and 10 years old are required to have a biennial inspection, and cars older than 10 years are required to undergo annual inspections. Furthermore, taxis are required to undergo inspections every six months. Road safety education and driver education are core tenants of Singapore's roads safety strategy. Road safety education is predominately undertaken by the Singapore Traffic Police, but nongovernmental organizations such as the National Security Coordination Secretariat contribute significantly to road safety education in Singapore. -
Publication
Concrete Pavements for Climate Resilient Low-Volume Roads in Pacific Island Countries
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-09-01)In pursuit of economic and social development objectives, governments of Pacific Island Countries (PICs) desire to upgrade unpaved low-volume roads (LVRs) for the improvement in connectivity and quality of life associated with all weather-access. Whilst the benefits are clear, the capital cost of conventional pavement technology and the recurrent cost of maintenance make it hard to justify the required investment in upgrading LVRs. Typical LVRs are surfaced with a bituminous chip seal or a thin asphalt concrete (AC) layer on processed aggregate base and subbase courses. Constructing such pavements in PICs is expensive, given the scarcity of aggregate of requisite quality, relatively limited domestic road construction capacity, and scale diseconomies in the use of equipment, plant and materials. Moreover, vulnerability to natural disasters and climate change necessitates consideration of more resilient paving alternatives. The findings of the study suggest that there is substantial promise for concrete pavements to be used for low-volume (<400 vehicles a day) roads. Four different types of concrete pavement were assessed including the strengths, weaknesses and operations and maintenance (O and M) implications of each pavement type. Although prepared primarily for the PICs, the study provides valuable insights and technical guidance on the application of concrete pavements for LVRs in other regions outside of the Pacific Islands. -
Publication
Speed Variation Analysis: A Case Study for Thailand's Roads
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-07-01)Research shows that vehicle speed affects the severity of all road crashes. Higher speed crashes involve more kinetic energy: the more energy that is dispersed in a crash, the more severe that crash will be. Speed also affects the likelihood of a crash occurring in the first place. The likelihood of a serious or fatal crash increases significantly even with small increases in vehicle speed. Field studies demonstrate that a one percent increase in mean average speeds results in a roughly two percent increase in the frequency of crashes involving injury, a three percent increase in severe crashes, and a four percent increase in deaths. The safety of infrastructure is heavily influenced by traffic speed, to the extent that without a detailed understanding of speed limits and vehicle operating speeds, it is difficult to assess the safety performance of infrastructure at a given location. This report seeks to highlight the central role of speed management in the Safe System approach and how a simple speed variation can improve safety for all types of road user. At the core of this report lies the experience derived from iRAP assessments undertaken under the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety (BIGRS) on 867 km of national roads in Thailand and 258 km of streets in Bangkok, between 2015 and 2019. This also involved capacity building activities with local partner, Chulalongkorn University, which led to almost 700 specialists being trained on road safety engineering during this period. The importance of speed in influencing road user risk is highlighted in two case studies on different road types in Thailand — the Outer Ring Road and Hathai Rat Road in Bangkok — to demonstrate the effects of different speeds on the iRAP Star Ratings. These ratings objectively quantify the likelihood of a crash, and its severity, whereby a person's risk of injury is highest on a 1-star road, and lowest on a 5-star road. Among a series of simulations and results, this report shows that enforcing a 10 kph speed limit reduction could prevent one in three fatal and serious injuries (FSIs) on both those roads. -
Publication
From A Rocky Road to Smooth Sailing: Building Transport Resilience to Natural Disasters
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)Reliable transport infrastructure is one of the backbones of a prosperous economy, providingaccess to markets, jobs and social services. Sustainable Development Goal 9 (SDG9) calls forincreased access to sustainable transport infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries.Collectively, these countries will need to spend between 0.5 percent and 3.3 percent of their GDPannually (157 billion to 1 trillion US Dollars) in new transport infrastructure by 2030 – plus an additional 1 percent to 2 percent of GDP to maintain their network – depending on their ambition and their efficiency in service delivery (Rozenberg and Fay, 2019). Because of the wide spatial distribution of transport infrastructure, many transport assets are exposed and vulnerable to natural hazards, increasing costs for national transport agencies and operators. During the 2015 floods in Tbilisi, Georgia, the repair of transport assets contributed approximately 60 percent of the total damage cost (GFDRR, 2015). In the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, accessibility as measured by the length of open networks directly after the shock dropped by 86 percent for highways and by 71 percent for railways (Kazama and Noda, 2012b). Such transport disruptions necessarily have direct impacts on the local economy. Employees face difficulties commuting, access to firms is disrupted for clients, interruptions in the supply chain inhibit production, and finished products cannot be easily shipped (Kajitani and Tatano, 2014). The paper, prepared as background material for the Lifelines report on infrastructure resilience, summarizes the main findings on the risk faced by transport networks and users as a result of natural disasters and climate change, and the main recommendations for building more resilient transport networks. It starts by describing how transport disruptions affect firms and households either directly and through supply chains. It then proposes a range of approaches and solutions for building more resilient transport networks, showing that the additional cost of resilience is not high if resources are well spent. Finally, it provides a set of practical recommendations. -
Publication
Transportation and Supply Chain Resilience in the United Republic of Tanzania: Assessing the Supply-Chain Impacts of Disaster-Induced Transportation Disruptions
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)The economy of the United Republic of Tanzania is growing fast but remains vulnerable to disasters, which are likely to worsen with climate change. Its transportation system, which mainly consist of roads, often get disrupted by floods. How could the resilience of the transportation infrastructures be improved? We formulate a new type of model, called DisruptSCT, which brings together the strength of two different approaches: network criticality analyses and input–output models. Using a variety of data, we spatially disaggregate production, consumption, and input–output relationships. Plugged into a dynamic agent-based model, these downscaled data allow us to simulate the disruption of transportation infrastructures, their direct impacts on firms, and how these impacts propagate along supply chains and lead to losses to households. These indirect losses generally affect people that are not directly hit by disasters. Their intensity nonlinearly increases with the duration of the initial disruption. Supply chains generate interdependencies that amplify disruptions for nonprimary products, such as processed food and manufacturing products. We identify bottlenecks in the network. But their criticality depends on the supply chain we are looking at. For instance, some infrastructures are critical to some agents, say international buyers, but of little use to others. Investment priorities vary with policy objectives, e.g., support health services, improve food security, promote trade competitiveness. Resilience-enhancing strategies can act on the supply side of transportation, by improving the quality of targeted infrastructure, developing alternative corridors, building capacity to accelerate post-disaster recovery. On the other hand, policies could also support coping mechanisms within supply chains, such as sourcing and inventory strategies. Our results help articulate these different policies and adapt them to specific contexts. -
Publication
Improving Climate Resilience of Federal Road Network in Brazil
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-05)Although Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, it has a relatively low number of natural hazards. However, its exposure to natural hazards has increased relative to other countries because of insufficient preventive actions in the past, resulting in more damage from natural hazards to both infrastructure and human lives than countries of comparable size would incur. Brazil faces an increasing risk of natural disasters, in particular floods and landslides. The objective of the study is to strengthen capacity of geohazard disaster resilience of federal highway infrastructure in Brazil through reviewing disaster risk management (DRM) capacity for federal road infrastructure and case studies of applying innovative methodologies for assessing disaster risk and evaluating economic benefits of resilience countermeasures. Although floods and landslides are the most recurrent natural disasters in Brazil, this report focuses on the latter, leaving floods for future studies. This report carefully describes how three innovative methodologies that, if properly applied, could improve the effectiveness of landslide risk management, thus reducing economic and human impacts. The report begins with diagnostics of the institutional capacities of geohazard risk management at the federal government level in Brazil. Chapters 1 and 2 include the backgrounds of natural disasters, road systems, and geohazards on roads in Brazil and a review of the road geohazard risk management with overviews of the following areas: institutional capacity and coordination, system planning, engineering designs, operation and maintenance, nonstructural measures, and contingency programming. Then, Chapters 3 and 4 describe the case study of application of the three innovative DRM assessment methodologies. Finally, Chapter 5 shows the suggestions and recommendations for the next steps. -
Publication
Measuring Rural Access: Update 2017/18
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02-01)Transport connectivity is an essential part of the enabling environment for inclusive and sustained growth. In many developing countries, particularly in Africa, most people are still not connected to local, regional, or global markets. Such rural accessibility is crucial to reduce poverty and promote inclusive economic growth. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim to build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation (Goal 9), for which Target 9.1 is to ‘develop quality, reliable, sustainable and resilient infrastructure, to support economic development and human well-being, with a focus on affordable and equitable access for all.’ The Rural Access Index (RAI) was proposed and accepted as an indicator to measure this target. The RAI is one of the most important global indicators in the transport sector. It measures the proportion of people who have access to an all-season road within an approximate walking distance of 2 kilometers (km). There is a common understanding that the 2 km threshold is a reasonable extent for people’s normal economic and social purposes. The definition is also simple enough to understand and use not only in the transport sector, but also in the broader development context, such as poverty alleviation. The initial RAI study in 2006 was based on household surveys and other simplified methods, estimating the global index at 68.3 percent, leaving a rural population of about one billion disconnected around the world. -
Publication
Climate Resilient Road Assets in Albania
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-02-01)This report consolidates the findings and recommendations from studies on climate resilient road assets in Albania, financed through a grant provided by the Global facility for disaster reduction and recovery (GFDRR). The objective of the work is to assist the Albanian authorities in the prioritization of current and future climate, and seismic resilient investments in the road sector. The work has used climate and seismic vulnerability assessments, and proposed mitigation measures to improve climate and seismic resilience of the Albanian road network. The report finds that the investment in resilience and mitigation measures on the Albanian national road network is cost effective and is much less than the estimated annualised cost of the damage and loss that would accrue if mitigation measures are not put in place and maintained.