What was the challenge?
In Australia and New Zealand, maintaining road connections to communities in rural and/or remote areas is vital, as often there is a lack of alternative connections. Lifelines are freight routes that have high value to the communities and regions they support, but often do not deliver positive outcomes in conventional cost-benefit analysis assessments due to relatively low traffic levels.
For lifeline routes, impacts can be difficult to both measure and value, and because of this, they may have been historically underfunded. This is even more pertinent given road managers are increasingly encountering problems managing climate change impacts and natural hazard events on lifeline routes.
In light of this, Austroads, the association of Australasian Road Transport and Traffic Agencies, engaged Frontier Economics, in partnership with Edge Impact, to update their Lifeline Risk Indicator Tool.The tool was first released in 2016.
