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This investigation aimed to reveal a mechanism of how different road projects' settings respond to macro-economic crisis. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed over a sample of 31 European road projects, in various funding arrangements and life cycle phases, all extracted from the Horizon 2020 BENEFIT project cases database. The project setting is described through a specific combination of project features and/or values of developed indicators. The analysis was applied to identify factors that contributed to projects’ performance regarding the resilience to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. By doing this, it became possible to determine potential liabilities of projects that are already in their implementation or use phases. The analysis showed there are equally strong contributors to a project’s success within country-specific, as well as project-specific features. In order to boost resilience toward sudden and unpredicted disruptions, several factors have emerged, such as long term planning, investing in top priority projects (preferably medium size investments), with realistic traffic projections and experienced and responsible concessionaires, but also having in place strong regulatory bodies and government support.The identified mechanism of enhancing the resilience to crisis caused by a specific project setting can be beneficial to multiple stakeholders.

Application of appropriate preventive maintenance treatments, at the right time, extends the service life of pavements, resulting in benefits to road users through increased ride comfort and safety and to road agencies through the reduction of future maintenance costs and improvement of the network condition. Preventive maintenance treatments usually have been applied on the highly trafficked sections of the Serbian national road network, but they have not been applied on the low-volume part of the network. This study used the Serbian low-volume roads network as a case study to identify appropriate preventive maintenance treatments for low-volume roads, model these into a pavement management system, and assess the potential benefits of their application compared with the current practice. The World Bank's RONET (road network evaluation tools) model, designed to assess the current characteristics of road networks and their future performance according to various levels of interventions (and budgets), was selected for this study. The model was modified for the study to incorporate use of preventive maintenance treatments. Modifications included adjustment of the pavement deterioration curves to incorporate a slower deterioration rate resulting from the application of crack sealing and pothole patching and surface dressings or thin overlays while the pavement was still in good condition. The results indicate that the use of preventive maintenance treatments would result in increased net benefits and a substantial reduction in future road agency costs compared with the maintenance scenario without preventive maintenance.

This paper presents the application of the World Bank's Road Network Evaluation Tools (RONET) model to strategic network-level analysis of the Serbian state low-volume road (LVR) network. This network condition deteriorated considerably during the 1990s as a result of the under-financing of its operations and maintenance. In recent years, financing for the road sector has gradually increased and focuses on the most hazardous and highly trafficked parts of the network. However, the overall budget allocated to the sector remains inadequate to maintain the entire state road network in stable condition. The goals of the presented study are to obtain the optimum maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) strategy and related budget, estimate the impact of different funding levels on future quality, and estimate the economic consequences of budget constraints for the M&R of the LVR network. Application of the RONET model to the prevailing conditions on the Serbian LVR network led to an optimal M&R strategy with a good balance between rehabilitation and periodic and recurrent maintenance. Implementation of the optimal M&R strategy would cause major improvement compared with the current condition of the LVR network. Implementation of higher M&R standards would lead to substantially higher road agency costs and, consequently, lower net benefits, whereas the implementation of lower M&R standards would lead to considerably worse network condition for approximately the same or slightly lower agency costs. This situation means that even minor budget constraints would result in considerably worse network condition and much higher total road transport costs.

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