• Journal of Korean Society of Transportation
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• v.23 no.5 s.83
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• pp.47-55
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• 2005

Roads deeply affect the life of people and keep doing an important role to support economic growth of a country. According to the budget plan of the ministry of construction and transportation of Korea, 8.1 trillion won have been allotted for road investment in the year of 2002 which occupy 61% of the transportation infrastructure special account (13.3 trillion won) and 4.7% of the total national budget (1,740 trillion won). It is true that services generated from road investment such as mobility enhancement and increased accessibility have shown positive effects through shortened travel time and decreased vehicle operating cost. However, it is also notable that many negative effects are gradually being discussed and those are nowadays getting severer due to enhanced people interests about road construction, increased concerns on environment and active public involvement that were evoked by traffic accidents, air pollution & noise and destruction of environment. Road construction processes in Korea are normally governed by administrative sectors (suppliers) not by users. These processes ate very weak to accomodate user s needs and community concerns thus easy to fail finalizing a road project without hassles. A public hearing process is supposed to be held in the processes of detailed design step and the environmental impact analysis. However, it is not enough to grab user's needs and community concerns. Increased public involvement frequencies, optimized public involvement timing and enhanced depth of public involvement magnitude are suggested to improve the current poor public involvement schemes in road planning and design processes. The application of these recommended methods to the road planning and design processes may guarantee the change from the current supplier-oriented schemes to the new user-oriented one. Also, this study suggests to reset objectivity and clarity of road construction process, to make conciliation guidelines based on many practical cases that produced good results, to introduce public involvement techniques in a stepwise basis, and to foster the professionals via education and training programs.