Planning and Evaluation of Rural Road Network Connectivity Using GIS

Rural road connectivity, and its sustained availability, is a key component of rural development. Rural roads are connecting areas of production with markets and connecting these with each other or to the state and national highways. The unavailability of database is major constrain to the access of rural roads. This paper envisages consolidation of the existing rural road network to improve its overall efficiency as a provider of transportation services for people, goods and services. This study has undertaken an extended attempt to develop geographic information system (GIS) based rural road database so that planners, decision makers, researchers and other different level authorities in the rural road sector will be benefited from the final output. The study area is located in Warangal District, Telangana, India. Network analysis has been conducted to select shortest path, service area accessibility, and closest facility, location allocation of a facility and shows the vehicle routing in terms of travel time, between two locations in the study area and towards rural hubs. The average travel times were observed from the field surveys. Rural hubs has been selected, from 46 habitations found in the study area, based on the cumulative weightage of rural infrastructures and the number of trough-routes they have. Furthermore, an evaluation of road network has done based on the connectivity measures before and after identification of critical links of the network and also identifies the centroid point of the network by measuring the connectivity values of the nodes. The paper also focused on development of planning model for upgradation of rural roads based on the link weightage and pavement condition index (PCI) of the road.