Intensive rural road development programs are under way in most of the developing countries but the task of implementing such programs is huge and complex, requiring comprehensive and coordinated planning of all the rural road development activities. The current planning practices are based mainly on ad hoc criteria that are not a good enough basis for planning major schemes. A planning model for systematically generating rural road networks is described. The model can be applied to any country that is planning a rural road network, even though the data used in developing the model belong to india. The model aims at generating a basic rural road network providing roadconnection from each village to a bigger center of activities for marketing, health, education, trade, social welfare, and so forth. For a rural area, several alternative networks can be generated; each of them will involve different construction costs, maintenance costs, travel costs, and social and economic benefits. The model selects the best alternative by minimizing the total cost or by aiming at tradeoffs between the given parameters. An iterative process has been developed for minimization of the total cost of a rural road network. The model is computer based to extend its utility and application, and its data requirements have been limited to what can be available from published census records, local government offices, and existing topographical maps. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1291, Fifth international conference on low-volume roads, may 19-23, 1991, raleigh, north carolina, volume 1.
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