Evaluation of Utility Management Practice in Road Construction Projects of Mekelle City

Poor installation, relocation, maintenance, and management of utilities in a road right-of-way causes; (a) project delays to ongoing road construction projects, (b) repetitive damage and service loss to utilities, and (c) frequent pavement cuts to roads after project completion. This research aimed to evaluate the telecommunication, electric power and water supply utilities management practice in Mekelle city, during the life cycle of road projects, with a special emphasis to the construction phase. The evaluation was made by using 14 project success criteria parameters to measure the performance of stakeholders according to the Ethiopian standards, and benchmarking the current practice with European & U.S.A best practices. Quantitative descriptive-survey approach followed by qualitative-case studies were used for the research. The quantitative data has been gathered using three different sets of questionnaires. Part I contained questions designed to study the pre-construction, and post-construction utility management practices. The respondents were road administrator, utility operators and urban planners. Part II and III of the questionnaire surveyed road designers and contractors for issues of utility management during road design and construction phases respectively. In order to confirm the responses from the questionnaire surveys, observations on 12 ongoing & 6 recently competed road projects, and desk study survey of 5 ongoing road projects were made. Then the root causes of utility management problems were identified using qualitative case studies on the capacity and limitations of individual stakeholders. Based on the data analysis it is concluded that, the current practice of utility management during a road project life cycle is very poor both according to the Ethiopian standards, and in comparison to the European and U.S.A. best practices. 98% of the ongoing road construction projects suffer impacts due to delay in relocating utilities; 43% of the contractors suffered frequent costs of utility damages; and 95% of the recently completed roads suffer from inadequacy of ROW, road-utility conflicts, and non-uniform utility installation practice. The root causes to the utility management problems are (1) inadequate or nonexistent standard guidelines, (2) lack of technology and knowledge for utility management, (3) absence of integrated infrastructure planning and development, and (4) absence of asset management program among the infrastructure planners and operators in Mekelle city.