| Abstract | As a newly industrialized country, Korea has shown remarkable economic growth in the last
three decades. This phenomenal growth has rapidly increased demands for better quality of life.
This includes, among others, increasing demand on high quality transportation system services (e.g.
safety, comfort and convenience).
In a view of the main role of the highway system towards regional development, the
requirements on regional equity have also become an important buoyant issue in development
planning. Needless to say, all these issues, including environmental concern, are difficult to explain
in economic terms only. Although, the conventional economic analysis technique has been used to
evaluate highway system improvement projects, it was not sufficient to encompass explicit consideration of the various factors mentioned above.
In this study, the method of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was utilized to evaluate rural
highway improvement projects in Korea. The results of the AHP application were then compared
to those of the conventional economic evaluation technique. In AHP, there are three interest groups
concerned namely, the highway users, the government and the members of the community, with
each group having its own specific set and structure of objectives. The decision hierarchy consists
of four levels.
To derive the relative weights among various groups and their objectives, paired comparison
questionnaires were used in interviewing experts from Korea comprising of transportation professors, researchers, planners, government officials and engineering specialists who are, one way or
the other, concerned and knowledgeable with the Korean transportation system. The appropriate
rural highway improvement projects for widening and paving were selected and studied on the basis
of some selection criteria.
The results have shown that there are some significant differences in prioritizing projects
using the conventional economic evaluation method with those resulting from the use of AHP. The
deviations of priorities of individual projects obtained in AHP have come out smaller and the
preference order has also partly changed. This implies that if we accommodate non-economic
factors, mostly intangibles, to the evaluation of rural highway improvement projects, the selected
project gives more beneficial effect to people whose demands are more diversified. As demonstrated,
the AHP proves to be an effective tool in evaluating transportation system projects. |