Localising Regional Transportation Infrastructure Planning

When we talked about transportation infrastructure, we will always say the discussion must be in broader view and macro scale simply because there are traffic from externality and the city cannot control the in and out of vehicles from within and also outside of the city. While there are traffic with origin and destination within the city, there are also traffic generated from the city and go out from the city as well as traffic come from elsewhere by passing the city with destination not within the city. Hence, strategic planning when it comes to transportation infrastructure provision is up most important. However, discussing the transportation planning without referring to local condition is also incomplete as although transportation infrastructure should serve the majority and for the good of national and regional context, the interest of local people should not be compromised without any serious consideration. For example, while the rail line is an important component of public transportation network that will lean modal split of travelling towards non private vehicles, the location of station , routing and beam column as well as the scheduling of construction work should have the input and feedback from the local community. This explained why while strategic planning is important in transport infrastructure provision, at time referral to local sentiments and localized issues is unavoidable. The discussion will be getting more complicated if few infrastructure projects with each other inter-linked and present bigger impact will have to be considered at the same time. This might encourage the possibility of power play and private negotiation in discarding projects that might bring in negative impacts to the particular community. It is definitely not an easy task in crystallizing local and individual project and upscale it to the strategic level.