Multicriteria Assessments of National Road Programs

In a world of regions trying to maximise their own welfare, conflicts will be a natural phenomenon. Maximising welfare involves a number of different goals to be fulfilled, but often these goals point in opposite directions. The objectives to be maximised may concern the distribution of resources among different groups of society, economic efficiency, environmental goals, or the level of production. The conflicts can arise between urban or other regions within a country, branches within an industry or between different sectors. A typical example would be the partly conflicting objectives of different sectors of the transportation system, both within and across regions. In this chapter the focus is on a set of different consequences or objective variables associated with traffic flows in a national road system.