Road Network Planning for Sustainable Urban Development in Kirtipur Municipality, Nepal

Road network deals with the development of a comprehensive plan for construction and operation of transportation facilities. In order to develop efficient and better transport facility, it is necessary to have a proper road network. In sustainable road network planning, planners put into consideration factors like gradients or slope, land-use and geology with community and governmental interest. These different considerations make the planning process complex and generate confusion in the decision making process. The use of geographic information system (GIS) and multi-criteria analysis (MCA)  has helped planners to reduce complexity and to achieve desired and more accurate results. MCA prevents the imposition of criteria limit and gives opportunity to decision makers to enter their own judgments. This provides a better communication among the community for creating a more open choice for analysis and possible changes if necessary. In this study, road network has been analyzed with optimal least cost path algorithm of spatial analysis in GIS using different ancillary data layers and each layer weight-scoring has been computed with MCA in spatial decision support system (SDSS). The optimal least cost path would provide the best option with certainty and considers a gradient, connected neighbors, thematic cost and surface distance in three dimensional spaces. The path gradient can be adjusted as per the requirements, depending upon the terrain conditions and possible to design a more realistic route automatically with appropriate parameters.Nepalese Journal on Geoinformatics -13, 2014, Page: 34-40