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This paper aims to quantify, for the first time, the performance expectations gap in community roadworks projects by proposing a performance expectations gap index (PEGI) that can answer a vital question of how wide/how narrow the gap is from a stakeholder perspective. Previous scholars have offered qualitative descriptions of the expectations gap from an auditing point of view using a constructivist approach. This study uses a positivistic approach in addressing the procurement performance expectations gap.

The index is computed by combining data from actual and perceived performance of public roadworks from two categories of respondents: “Technical personnel” and “Road users” in selected District Local Governments (DLGS) of Uganda using paired mean differences. The authors created grand means from these two groups for us to make a meaningful comparison. Data were collected from community access roads projects opened, maintained and completed and the satisfaction levels from 69 DLGS. The community leaders and political representatives formed a group of road-users, whereas DLG Engineering staff represented the technical staff. Data was collected on the extent to which the DLG had achieved performance efficiency, performance effectiveness and performance reasonableness. The measurements items was anchored along the continuum of: (5) Outstanding = Performance is consistently superior to (1) Unsatisfactory = Performance is consistently unacceptable.

Study findings show the level of performance of roadworks attained by technical staff is only 65%, with 15.9% gap is attributed to performance efficiency, the 29.1% gap is attributed to performance effectiveness issues and 20% gap is the perceived performance unreasonableness gap in the stakeholder’s perspective, creating an overall performance gap of 35%, in the perspective of road users. From the computations carried out, the authors determined the size of the expectation gaps by the technical DLG stakeholders and road-users of 0.3493. The gap index (0.3493) falls within the range between 0.2 and 0.39, which is a small performance expectations gap, calling for top management’s attention to identify and work on the parameters causing operational inefficiency within implementing units of DLGs. Study findings show the level of performance of roadworks attained by technical staff is 65%, creating a performance gap of 35%, in the perspective of road users.

The implications of these results can ignite a meaningful debate on whether financing of road projects should be based on how narrow the performance gap should be and having sustained evidence that the gap is progressively being narrowed for improved sustainability of roadworks financing by donor agencies. Whereas this quantification of the performance gap is a new positivistic direction towards minimizing the performance expectation gap, it can easily be adopted by roadworks implementing units in assessing road-user performance needs at the point of project completion and once these are not achieved, such minor loopholes would be worked on, on a regular basis as and when need warrants.

The authors have introduced and empirically verified the performance expectation gap index, which further understands the performance expectations gap from a positivistic approach. The paper provides a problem-solving tool to analyse stakeholder engagement linkages with performance expectations variations on the practical side.

The paper has started on a change perception campaign of shaping road-user critical perspectives about the outcome of community roadworks procurements. By introducing and creating a mindset of quantitative assessments in understanding the expectation gaps that can be caused by a number of factors, the responsible people for creating, maintaining and widening PEGs will eventually wake up and improve personal behaviours that lead to the widening of the procurement performance gap in roadworks, from a stakeholders’ perspective.

Unlike previous scholars who used a constructivist approach, the paper is the first of its kind to use a positivistic approach to quantify the procurement performance expectations gap using a PEGI. The use of the index gives new insights to managing procurement performance expectations to the satisfaction of stakeholders from a quantitative perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to present a socio-technical approach to modeling the behavior of roadway users, asset managers, and politicians toward roadway performance and asset management. This approach models the complex interactions that occur between these agents in a complex system. Most modeling approaches in the domain of infrastructure asset management take a purely asset-centric approach and fail to address these socio-technical interactions.

Interactions among political decision makers, asset management strategy developers, and road users are modeled using a game-theoretic approach. The interactions are modeled as a non-cooperative game in which politicians, asset managers, and road users are the main players. Each player is autonomous and aims to come up with the set of moves to maximize their respective level of satisfaction in response to other players’ moves. Multi-attribute utility theory is used to deal with multitude of players’ goals, and the Nash equilibria of the game are south out to develop appropriate strategies for different players.

An illustrative example for a road network of a Canadian city is used to demonstrate the developed methodology. The developed methodology demonstrates how behaviors of various agents involved in the sphere of asset management impacts their collective decision-making behavior.

The developed framework provides asset managers and political decision makers with a valuable tool to evaluate the impact of public policy decisions related to asset managers on road performance and the overall satisfaction of road users.

Singapore's land transportation is governed by a comprehensive set of rules, regulations, operations and systems to ensure its effectiveness and efficiency. The Land Transport Authority (LTA) is the main agency in charge of road operations. Despite the LTA's best efforts, road related problems still surface every now and then. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to boost the performance of existing road infrastructure. Using Singapore as a case, the specific research objectives are to: ascertain motorists’ level of satisfaction with the road infrastructure; find out problems faced by motorists when using the road infrastructure; determine factors affecting motorists’ satisfaction with the road infrastructure; and design and test a model to predict motorists’ satisfaction with the road infrastructure.

A questionnaire survey was conducted on motorists. Through a combination of convenience sampling and snowball sampling, a total of 53 responses were collected. After the survey, interviews were conducted with subject matter experts to understand the current practices and possible solutions to the problems.

The most significant problem is water ponding on roads. Traffic redirection due to road works and coordination among government agencies in road opening works also did not achieve significantly good ratings. Two practices are found to directly give rise to higher satisfaction with the road infrastructure: road cleanliness; and efficiency in traffic redirection arising from road works.

Motorists were asked to rate on a ten‐point scale. This may give rise to bias because satisfaction and performance are subjective and not easily quantified.

Motorists’ satisfaction level with the road infrastructure is dependent on cleanliness of roads and efficiency of traffic diversion when there are road works. The implication is that the government should arrange for roads to be regularly cleaned and at the same time educate the public to keep roads clean and enforce laws against those who litter. The time for traffic diversion should be minimized by increasing productivity of road works, so that these can be completed quickly.

The road network is a valuable infrastructural asset of a country. Due to its large scale and complexity, managing road operations is no easy feat. Even though Singapore has a comprehensive set of procedures, rules and regulations to manage this asset, problems and complaints continue to surface. This study has identified the major problems plaguing Singapore's road infrastructure. Furthermore, a model to predict motorists’ satisfaction with the road infrastructure was successfully developed and tested. With this knowledge in mind, the LTA can focus on improving these factors to boost performance of road infrastructure through road maintenance and road works.

The Algerian transport sector has undergone profound changes in recent decades with its privatization. Transport sector liberalization has achieved its primary objectives aimed at increasing public transport supply, but it has been accompanied by travel conditions deterioration because of public regulation insufficiency. For this, the Algerian State has put regulatory and institutional mechanisms to improve urban transport service quality. These mechanisms directly impose on operators and managers of transport means reception stations to meet the expectations of road users. The purpose of this study is to draw a portrait of the service quality of the Algerian urban transport. For this, a fieldwork was carried out in Batna city to know the degree of satisfaction of urban transport users toward the service offered.

In this work, the authors used questionnaires as a means of data collection. The study sample is composed of 102 users of the line. The questionnaire deals with personal data (age, sex, level of education, family and professional data), data on the nature of travel between the city of Batna and Tazoult (reasons for travel, travel time and the number of trips undertaken) and measure of user satisfaction on the Tazoult–Batna line according to the criteria of service offer, accessibility, information, duration, attention to the customer, comfort, security and environmental impact. In this work, participatory observation was also used to give a better understanding on how the urban network operates in the city. To this end, an observation grid with key questions has been prepared. It is concentrated on three axes: the actual organization of private operators providing urban bus transport, the state of buses, stations and stopping points and the practice of control by the services concerned. For this, trips were made on all urban lines during the study period. Discussions were conducted with some private operators to find out their positions and their roles in the operation of urban bus transport.

The results of this work show that satisfaction levels were average for transport supply, accessibility, duration, attention paid to customer, comfort and safety; however, they were low concerning information and environmental impact. The present work has made it possible to highlight the impacts of urban transport disorganization on the offered service. In addition, taking into account the expectations of users in terms of service quality should have positive impacts for the users themselves, for private and public operators and for urban transport managers.

This work presents a state of knowledge on the service quality in an urban environment and delivers information on the situation in Algeria without pretending to be exhaustive. However, the contribution of this study is not limited to the evaluation of the various criteria themselves, which are found in whole or in part in many studies devoted to this kind of evaluations. The real contribution of this work lies in highlighting the impacts of urban transport disorganization on the offered services quality. This disorganization is essentially characterized by a weakness or absence of an institutional framework and the multiplication of actors at different levels of intervention, which creates overlapping responsibilities or organizational gaps.

Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is a common practice in both the public and private sectors. PPP has been an important instrument to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the national level. However, the role of PPP at the subnational level is often scarcely studied. Using Khulna city of Bangladesh as a case, this paper aims to assess the role of PPP projects in the attainment of SDGs.

The research was conducted in the Central Business District (CBD) of Khulna, on a total of 4.6 kilometers stretches of road medians in the CBD where landscaping was done through the PPP approach. Besides the collection of secondary data from official records, primary data were collected through site visits, field surveys and interviews of PPP project partners.

The result shows that 89 percent of the respondents (road users) were pleased with the landscaping done on the road medians. Similarly, about 86 percent of the respondents felt more comfortable and safer to use the roads. Well-maintained road medians allow road-crossing at a regular interval which reduces the chance of an accident. The private parties have installed promotional billboards on the road medians and saved BDT 10.82 million a year. The public authority saves the maintenance budget amounting to BDT 23 million a year. The project achieves a triple-win situation. Despite some limitations, this PPP project has taken Khulna a step forward to achieve SDGs.

The findings have policy implications as the PPP project has enhanced the resilience of Khulna by addressing the relevant SDGs.

Many road authorities considered contracting out road maintenance to the private sector based on performance measures as an alternative and better solution than traditional methods of contracting. It highlights issues of interest to road authorities in the context of saving maintenance costs and managing contracting times effectively. This method is named as performance based maintenance by contracting (PBMC) and has substantial success records in minimizing infrastructure maintenance costs in many developed and developing countries over the last two decades. It has received the attention of researchers and practitioners. However, the literature on PBMC is reasonably high although the concept of PBMC is relatively new. The purpose of this paper is to carry out a comprehensive state of the art review of the literature that has been conducted in the recent years.

A total of 62 published report and journal articles related to performance based maintenance by contracting for road network system has been analysed and reviewed in this paper.

This paper analyses the literature on PBMC and presents examples of developed and developing countries that have been successfully maintaining their road network systems using PBMC as their preferred method of contracting.

The potential of reducing maintenance costs, increasing the quality of works and reducing the chance of corruption in the long run in developing countries are the challenging issues for PBMC, which needs more attention. This paper can be used as a base or platform for future research in the area of PBMC such as developing optimal policies and cost models.

This paper would be useful for the research on PBMC. It would be beneficial for the engineers or professionals in improving the performance of road maintenance and management.

This chapter provides an overview of the potential use of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and associated artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in the land transport sector in an attempt to achieve related United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets. ITS applications that have now been extensively tested worldwide and have become part of the everyday transport toolkit available to practitioners have been discussed. AI techniques applied successfully in specific ITS applications such as automatic traffic control systems, real-time image processing, automatic incident detection, safety management, road condition assessment, asset management and traffic enforcement systems have been identified. These methods have helped to provide traffic engineers and transport planners with novel ways to improve safety, mobility, accessibility and efficiency in the sector and thus move closer to achieving the various SDG targets pertaining to transportation.

This paper is based on users’ satisfaction with housing infrastructure as a derivative of their participation in evolving the facilities from inception. The paper aims to examine optimal performance of infrastructural facilities with a view to determine the satisfaction of users in the study area.

This study reports on a cross-sectional doctoral research study on 304 household heads in the transitional and peripheral zones of Akure, Nigeria. The infrastructure studied were water supply, electricity supply, roads, drainage, waste management and security. A structured questionnaire, focus group discussions and physical observations were used. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, mean satisfaction scoring and categorical regression analysis.

Respondents found the infrastructural facilities in their communities to be unsatisfactory; they also indicated low levels of participation in the provision of infrastructure. Residents were most satisfied with waste management and least satisfied with water supply. The results showed a significant relationship between users’ participation and satisfaction with housing infrastructure.

The findings imply that giving adequate attention to users’ involvement in the provision process of infrastructural projects can enhance their satisfaction with infrastructure.

The study highlights the benefits of involving users in the process of providing housing infrastructure, establishing a positive relation with their satisfaction.

Researchers have studied processes of improving road traffic-safety culture by explicitly evaluating the socio-psychological phenomenon of traffic-risk. The implicit traffic-system cues play an important role in explaining urban traffic-culture. This paper aims to ascertain an interpretive framework of the alternative processes of road traffic safety culture is antecedent to promote traffic-safety behaviour in Indian urban context. Subsequently, the authors discussed the reasons for those relationships exists.

Four experts of the urban traffic-safety domain participated in total interpretive structural modelling (TISM) study by completing an interpretive consensus-driven questionnaire. The drafted interpretive model was evaluated for road users proactive action orientation about the traffic-safety decision.

The evolved directed graph (digraph) of the culture of urban traffic-safety management was a serial three-mediator model. The model argued: In the presence of traffic-risk cues, people may become apprised to safety goals that initiate traffic-safety action. Consequently, expectancy-value evaluation motivates the continuation of traffic-safety intention that may lead to the implementation of adaptation plan (volitional control), thus habituating road users to traffic-safety management choice.

The modellers of traffic psychology may empirically estimate and test for the quality criteria to ascertain the applicability of the proposed mechanism of urban traffic-safety culture. The decision-makers should note the importance of arousal of emotions regarding traffic-risk, reduce the impact of maladaptive motivations and recursively improve control over safety actions for promoting safety interventions.

The authors attempted to induce an interpretive model of urban traffic-safety culture that might augment extant discussion regarding how and why people behave in an urban traffic system.