Development of an online tool for rapid economic evaluation of road closure scenarios

(Client: New Zealand Transport Agency)

An online version of the non-spatial MERIT tool was developed under funding from NZTA as part of a wider package of tools for assessing the economic impacts associated with an outage in the State Highway network.

A front-end GIS tool, developed by Abley Transportation Consultants, selects any segment of the State Highway network and, in turn, simulates the consequential changes in freight and passenger transportation associated with re-routing. This information is then fed into the online version of non-spatial MERIT and the economic impacts of the outage reported.

NZTA have undertaken pilot studies applying the MERIT tool to real recent major network outages. This includes a pilot of the SH3 Manawatu Gorge 2011-12 outage [PDF, 403 KB].

NZTA have also developed a MERIT Primer [PDF, 741 KB] that provides a digestible summary of the findings.