When a city or county begins considering major improvements in its streets, a process is initiated that is often complex. Important decisions must be made: Which streets should be improved? How are they to be improved? How much will it cost? Where will the money come from? When should construction take place? These are just a few of the obvious considerations that must be taken into account by public works officials. Questions must also be addressed to parties outside the government: what will the property owners say? Will the local utilities be involved? How many other government jurisdictions will be involved?

Answering these and the myriad of other questions that come up during the early stages of street improvement projects (or drainage, sewer or other such construction projects) obviously involves data collection and analysis. But because these relatively large-scale projects are conceived months and sometimes years before ground-breaking and because there are so many variables to consider, they require advance planning-planning well before the initiation of engineering and design. Too often the consequences of not systematically planning the early aspects of a project's life cycle are cost overruns due to redesigns and angry citizen outbursts due to unreasonably long periods of inconvenience, or last minute notification of a change to their street.

This report is part of the collection of scanned historical documents available to the public.