• Termination of the OPRC contracts on TMDs;
• Withdrawal of funding to some donor funded projects has severely constrained the local resource budget,
• Lack of adequate procurement capacity at the Local Road Authorities meant that the bulk of the procurement process had to be carried out headquarters there by overwhelming HQ staff.

3 Future Network Condition Criteria

Table 3-1 shows the trend in the overall condition on Zambia’s paved Trunk, Main and District Roads since 2006. An assessment has revealed that the present ROADSIP II roughness criteria was too high compared with the maintenance options limits, thereby increasing the expenditure to maintain the road network unnecessarily. This lead to the introduction of a revised set of criteria for the condition of the paved road network where it was observed that a good road will not require more than routine maintenance and this is fulfilled for a roughness less than 4.5 and all traffic ranges. A revision in the ROADSIP II criteria as observed in Table 3-1, has seen the bulk of the paved network on TMDs falling in a good condition rather than fair condition with the previous criteria which has a tremendous bearing on the maintenance budget of the network.

Table 1.1: Condition based on Total Paved Road Network

For future road condition data collection, the network condition criteria shall conform to what is proposed in table 3-2. This method offers a more robust performance assessment of the network both paved and unpaved than what was used earlier under RoadSIP II. This is the criteria that is been used in the Zambia Highway Management System.

Table 3.2: Proposed new ROADSIP II Criteria