New technologies for transport route selection

Planning a new road or railway can be an expensive and time-consuming process. There are numerous environmental issues that need to be addressed, and the problem is exacerbated where the alignment is also influenced by the location of services, existing roads and buildings, and the financial, social and political costs of land resumption. A comprehensive approach to the problem is available through the recent convergence of: geospatial imaging, softcopy photogrammetry, regional significance analysis and alignment optimisation. The first technology is concerned with obtaining low cost data containing far more information than was available in the past. The second two are concerned with extracting from that data, information essential to the planning process. The final technology is about automating the way alignments are generated to produce low cost, high quality routes. The convergence of these enabling technologies can have a major impact on the way that various jobs are performed – or whether they are done at all. Separately, they can have a major influence on a large number of disciplines, but taken in combination they can change the paradigm of alignment planning completely. By taking tasks that were previously difficult, time-consuming and expensive, and making them easy, fast and cheap, they can change completely the way alignments are planned.