Risk management for infrastructure corridors vulnerable to adjacent land development

Communities worldwide face diminished infrastructure performance and increased operating and capital costs resulting from unmanaged industrial, commercial, and residential development that impinges on their infrastructure corridors. It is important that planners anticipate and proactively manage land development along the corridors to avoid surprise, regret, and belated action. This paper demonstrates an approach utilizing expert elicitation and geographic data (i) to assess the relative risk of land development adjacent to infrastructure corridors, and (ii) to focus and prioritize corridor sections for risk management. The approach uses several factors to score adjacent properties according to their relative likelihoods of development in a 10- to 20-year horizon. The scores are compared to land values and existing road-access points in order to illuminate the relative costs of risk management along corridor centerlines. The risk-management options, including land acquisition, negotiation with developers, and limitations on future access points, are discussed. The approach is germane for risk-based protection of infrastructure corridors of both developed and developing regions of the world, for a range of time horizons, geographic scales, and infrastructure networks.