Saskatchewan's economy is largely dependent on inter-provincial and international trade. Various bulk commodity movements are major part of highway transportation demand. Due to the province's land locked location, keeping transportation costs low is critical for the competitiveness of the provincial economy. Saskatchewan also needs a large roadway network to provide transportation service to its wide spread population and economic activities. With the recent changes in Saskatchewan economy and transportation patterns, there has been a significant increase in truck traffic, which results in deterioration of many highways, especially for the non-structured Thin Membrane Surface (TMS) highways. There is also an increasing demand for rural highways to allow primary weight access to increase highway transportation efficiency for economic development. In order to most effectively use the limited funds, Saskatchewan Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure has developed a Rural Highway Strategy (RHS) and a Northern Transportation Strategy (NTS) to guide its capital investment on rural highways and roads in northern Saskatchewan. Both RHS and NTS utilize a rational multiple factor evaluation method to prioritize the segmented highway sections for investment. This paper will describe the details of the strategy development, including factor selections and quantifications, as well as the determination of weighting for each factor. The paper will also introduce the process of priority ranking and implementation issues for the capital investment strategies. Some difficult policy and technical aspects such as those involving engineering data uses will also be discussed. (A) For the covering asbtarct of this conference see ITRD number E220308.
Abstract