India has been making significant progress in responding to the demands of today’s cities by incorporating robust space technologies and GIS into the urban planning, transport management and traffic navigation techniques.
The development of Road Asset Management system for National Highways (NHs) is a flagship project by the National Highways Authority of India in association with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and the World Bank. Bringing both public and private funded roads under one umbrella, the main objective of this project is to assist in accurate and scientific maintenance planning, enhance road safety measures and plan the development of the NH network in India.
Taking international best practices as global benchmarks, the project makes an optimal use of geospatial technologies for the planning and management of the National Highways, for monitoring road segments under construction, for analysing the patterns of congestion and traffic jams, for better junction arrangement planning, for examining the land use situation for development of NHs and for strengthening road safety measures by identifying black spots. Under this project, a web-based software system has been developed to collect location-based, spatial data for more than 200 attributes of a road. With this comprehensive system of data collection, major stakeholders, like the Transport Ministry, Finance Ministry, National Highways Authority of India, state public works department, police departments, funding agencies, developers and citizens are able to conduct map audits and extract relevant information which is readily available within the system. The software is also equipped to interface with the indigenous Bhuvan satellite images.
Additional details and more practices like this can be found in Geospatial Practices for Sustainable Development in Asia and the Pacific 2020: A Compendium