Post-Disaster Road Reconstruction in Aceh - Local Governments’ Role in Road Maintenance

Many studies have shown the importance of improved road infrastructure towards economic development of a region through economic agglomeration and widened business network coverage resulting from better access and higher mobility. However, such benefit can only be achieved if road infrastructure remains accessible and reliable in the long term period. Accordingly, in addition to resources required for the construction, road management will also need to allocate adequate resources for the maintenance. In the event of major natural disasters, road infrastructure is among the sectors that often suffer from the greatest damages and losses. It is also suggested that reconstruction of road infrastructure is critical for a speedy recovery process. In the case of tsunami reconstruction in Aceh, Indonesia, poor road infrastructure is also argued to have caused delays and higher reconstruction cost. In most developing countries such as Indonesia, another important issue requiring particular attention is the ability and capability of local government in maintaining road infrastructures. In the post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh, disregard to road classification and ownership status (national, Prov. or district), most of road reconstruction projects were either funded or co-funded by national government and donor agencies; which project outcomes were then transferred to local government. This resulted in giving additional burden to local governments with low technical and financial capacity for maintaining and ensuring the long term benefit of the investment, particularly where there are more road networks reconstructed than destroyed. Accordingly, this paper, which is based on an ongoing PhD study, discusses issues identified in the post-disaster road reconstruction in Aceh with regards to local governments’ capacity in road maintenance. The discussion includes regulations, policies and other aspects that contributed to the road management and maintenance within the context of Aceh post-tsunami reconstruction

The Challenges and Obstacles of Post-Disaster Road Infrastructure Reconstruction in the Pre-Construction Phase

Purpose The reconstruction of road infrastructure in the post-disaster context require different approach when compared with road projects in the normal development context. Disaster recovery projects are seen as having their own unique identity, particularly due to stakeholder issues, resource challenges, capability issues, and even long-term reliability concerns. This paper invites a discussion regarding the challenges and obstacles identified in the reconstruction of road infrastructure in a post-disaster reconstruction setting, and focuses the discussion on the pre-construction phase. Design/ Methodology/ Approach The challenges and obstacles presented in this paper are based on the literature and the empirical evidence collected from the research in three case study districts in Aceh, Indonesia. Twenty-eight face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders of road infrastructure at the local, provincial and national level, and represented by respondents from the public works, planning agency, disaster management agency, consultant, contractors, and donor agencies. The findings were triangulated with the literature and consulted with five experts in the road infrastructure and disaster reconstruction area. Findings The identified challenges and obstacles are divided into three groups of discussion; planning and programming, road design, and procurement. Whilst some of these challenges are not unique to post-disaster context, the scale of the risks had been undermined. Originality/ value This paper identifies the challenges and obstacles of a road project in the post-disaster setting from the pre-construction perspective. Identification of these challenges and obstacles may help improve the implementation of post-disaster road infrastructure reconstruction projects in future recovery projects, particularly in the developing world

Traffic control enforcement : the problems and dilemma in maintaining post-disaster road infrastructure assets : a case study from Aceh, Indonesia

In 2004, Aceh province was devastated by the earthquake and tsunami. Within the four-year reconstruction period between 2005 and 2009, more than 3600 km of roads were rehabilitated and reconstructed. The ownerships of the reconstructed road assets were transferred back to the Local Governments for the operational and maintenance needs. Hence, the responsibility to maintain most of the road sections are now held by the Local Governments. This paper highlights the problems and dilemmas identified in enforcing the traffic loading control as part of the road maintenance efforts. The data was collected from the literature, documents and through semi-structured interviews conducted with 28 respondents from the case study districts in Aceh province. The finding suggest that conflicting institutional arrangement and policies, socioeconomic consideration and corruption have been the major constraints to effective traffic control enforcement efforts

Road Reconstruction in Post – Disaster Recovery; Challenges and Obstacles

Increasing numbers of events and victims caused by natural disaster have been unequally distributed throughout the world. Disfavour to the developing countries, evidence shows that developing countries are more vulnerable to disaster risk due to the significantly larger number of fatal injuries and higher threats to reaching development goals. In the event of natural disaster, road infrastructure appears to be one of the development sectors with the greatest losses and damages. On the one hand, even though road infrastructure plays an important role in accelerating the recovery process, post-disaster reconstruction of road infrastructure has not been adequately determined and has been frequently ignored by many aid agencies giving an extra burden to the community as it adds delays to the recovery process. On the other hand, aid agencies working on reconstruction of road infrastructure may have to face issues that are unique, in context and scale, to post-disaster project in developing countries. Accordingly, this paper tries to identify challenges and obstacles identified in the reconstruction of road infrastructure in Aceh post-tsunami recovery. Since this paper reviews the reconstruction of Aceh post-tsunami road infrastructure as a case study, limitations may then exist to large scale natural disasters in developing countries, and in particular, post-disaster of earthquake and tsunami events

The Impact of the Local Political and Socio-Economic Condition to the Capacity of the Local Governments in the Maintenance of Post-Disaster Road Infrastructure Reconstruction Assets

The post-tsunami reconstruction in Aceh, Indonesia, resulted in more than 3600km of road section reconstructed. The ownerships of the reconstructed road assets were transferred back to the Local Governments for the operational and maintenance needs. Hence, the responsibility to maintain most of the road sections are now held by the Local Governments. This paper examines the impacts of the local political and socio-economic condition to the capacity of the Local Governments in the maintenance of postdisaster road reconstruction assets in Aceh, Indonesia. Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives of road infrastructure stakeholders at the local, provincial and national level. The analysis reveals the main political and socio-economic factors affecting the capacity of the Local Governments in road maintenance

A Generalization of the Finite-Length Scaling Approach Beyond the BEC

We want to extend the approximation of the error probability via a scaling approach from the BEC to general binary-input memoryless output-symmetric (BMS) channels. In particular, we consider such scaling laws for regular LDPC ensembles and message-passing (MP) decoders with a finite number of messages. We first show how to re-derive the scaling law for transmission over the BEC using an “EXIT-like” curve instead of the density evolution curve of the peeling decoder. The advantage of the new derivation is that the new expression of the scaling parameter α only contains quantities that can be meaningfully interpreted also for general message-passing algorithms. In particular, this expression only depends on the curvature of the EXIT-like curve as well as the variance of the messages, both taken at the critical channel parameter. We discuss how to compute these quantities for general MP algorithms and we evaluate the expressions for the specific cases of the Gallager algorithm A as well as the Decoder with Erasures and compare the resulting predictions on the error probability with simulation results