Planning of National Transport Infrastructure
In the Islamic Countries
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 Multimodal: examines pedestrian, transit, bicycling, and automobile, as well as rail (freight
and passenger), air, and water modes of transportation and identifies supporting land use
and programmatic strategies.
Furthermore, technical factors in NTI planning also deal with the extent of complementarity of
road, rail, air, and water based transport modes. Complementarity should be interpreted in the
way that these transport modes do not primarily compete with each other’s. Modern societies
experience a growing demand for passenger and freight movement. Accurate forecasting of the
total passenger and freight demand and the competitive (or substitutive) and complementary
relationships among transport modes are necessary inputs in planning, designing, evaluating
and regulating transport and supply chain systems (Tsekeris and Tsekeris, 2011).
Mapping the environmental burden as an effect of implementing transport infrastructure
projects and the associated changes in transport use, the so-called Environmental Impact
Assessment, is ideally being part of a national transport plan. Together with a socio-economic
evaluation, these assessments are mostly used to compare and prioritize projects, corridors, and
transport modes. The monetary and the non-monetary impacts are compared and weighed in a
systematic way for different alignments as a basis for recommending a specific alignment. This
is especially of importance for road projects that often involve issues of conflicting interests
(Fischer, 2006).
The identification of the impacts of a road project is based on the analysis of the possible
conflicts between the environment surrounding and the infrastructure to be implemented. This
analysis allows to link associate the sources of the impact with the different phases of the
infrastructure, namely pre-construction, construction and operation. To do so, there can be
distinguished two different levels of environmental consequences:
 The primary impacts directly caused by the realization and implementation works and
that physically affect the natural and human heritage that create the environment of the
areas concerned.
 Secondary impacts resulting from the primary ones. They can be perceived through
their impact reducing the environmental capital by destruction, removal or degradation
of the five main resources: soil, water, air, flora, and wildlife.
On a human level, these impacts are those that will affect the living conditions on the three
levels: economic activities, socio-cultural activities and quality of life.
In terms of assessment, López et al. (2009) argue that traditional transport infrastructure
assessment methodologies rarely include the full range of strategic benefits for the
transportation system. One of these benefits is the contribution to cross‐border integration. This
is a critical issue for the integration process of countries with international transport corridors.
Finally, a national transport master plan covers mainly transport infrastructure and
investments related to passenger transport and less on freight transport. Planning on
multimodal freight transport is mostly documented in a multimodal freight transport master
plan (or Road Freight Strategy as in the case of South Africa) to address the unique
characteristics, needs and impacts of freight movement.