Territorial assessment methodology for the development of road infrastructure initiative.

Abstract

The Road Administration is responsible for developing the country's public road infrastructure, ensuring that its interventions have the greatest positive social, economic, cultural, environmental, and territorial impact. To fulfill this mission, one of the tasks carried out by the Road Administration, through its Development Sub-Directorate, is the preparation of a Regional Road Project Portfolio for a period of seven years. In addition, it must define the initial universe of new and carry-over investment initiatives that aspire to be part of the annual budget. Although the Road Administration receives 60% of the annual budget from the Ministry of Public Works, this is not enough to carry out all the initiatives that make up the Project Portfolio. Therefore, each year these are prioritized by the regions in order to determine which ones will continue with the next stages of the road project life cycle (Krause Monsalve, 2023). Therefore, it is essential that the Road Administration thoroughly and comprehensively evaluate which projects to carry out in order to ensure the greatest benefits. In order to improve this process of identifying initiatives, we propose incorporating territorial information into the evaluation of the Road Project Portfolio. In effect, this document presents a methodology based on expert consensus and a forward-looking approach to expand the analysis prior to the identification and prioritization of initiatives in the Project Portfolio, incorporating relevant information for each region and highlighting the particularities of the territory as a complementary decision-making criterion. In this sense, the methodology seeks to identify potential territories for road infrastructure projects through territorial variables such as isolation, tourism, productivity, and risks, among others.