Strategic highway planning in Thailand

Abstract

The authors describe how, using available World Bank assistance, the Kingdom Of Thailand's Department Of Highways (DOH), part of the Ministry Of Transport and Communications, engaged consultants in late 1993, to prepare a long-term strategic highway plan for the Kingdom. This is the first time that a long-range perspective was applied to the planning of the nation's highway system. The technique will enable DOH to better plan its road development and to be more consistently responsive to the demographic and social changes taking place throughout the Kingdom. The five-year planning period previously used resulted in plans that were relatively inflexible and sometimes led to dramatic shifts of emphasis in response to plan changes in other sectors, or as a result of major midterm revisions of the plans.