The author has in this paper, endeavoured to describe the importance of the rural community in developing countries and to indicate the large volume of resources being devited to transport investment and maintenance. Using as an example the development of the planning research programme of the Road Research Laboratory. He has discussed work aimed at achieving the optimum use of transportation investment funds in overcoming rural development problems. He has progressed from precisely defined and restricted sub-models of physical cost relationships to the transport needs of discrete socioeconomic development projects in the agricultural areas, to the partial regional analysis of complementary mixed development linking rural areas with "urban" service centres.
Abstract