Designing Roads for Everyone
16 November | 16:00–17:30 

Roads are among the most visible public assets in people’s daily lives, shaping how communities access jobs, schools, markets, health services and social opportunities. The way roads are planned and designed therefore says a great deal about whether transport systems truly serve the full diversity of users and territories they are meant to support. Yet in most networks the implicit ‘default’ user has been an able-bodied adult in a private car, and design standards have followed. The people who bear the consequences of that assumption are not few: vulnerable road users — pedestrians, cyclists and users of powered two- and three-wheelers — already account for 53% of the world’s 1.19 million annual road deaths, with pedestrians and cyclists alone making up close to a third.

The groups most often underserved by conventional road design are not a minority at the margins. An estimated 1.3 billion people — one in six of us — live with significant disability, and many face physical barriers to moving through streets and using transport safely and independently. Older persons, a fast-growing share of the population; children travelling to school; women navigating routes shaped around different trip patterns and safety concerns; and rural communities cut off from all-season access each experience the same network very differently. Around 700 million rural residents still lack access to an all-season road, and in many cities of the Global South fewer than a third of residents can easily reach public transport.

When road investments reflect the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, persons with disabilities, rural communities, older persons, children and other underserved groups, they can strengthen trust in public institutions and reinforce the social value of infrastructure. Inclusive design is not only a matter of fairness; it is closely tied to safety and to the legitimacy of public spending. A footway that is continuous and accessible, a crossing a child or a wheelchair user can negotiate, a rural road that stays passable in the wet season — these are the details that determine whether people believe the system was built with them in mind. 

This session will explore how inclusion can be embedded more systematically into planning, design, appraisal and investment decisions, leading to road networks that are safer, fairer and more broadly supported by the communities they serve. The central challenge is one of timing and process: inclusion is too often added late — as a consultation exercise or an accessibility retrofit — rather than built into the standards, appraisal methods and investment criteria that shape a project from the outset. Moving it earlier raises practical questions about design guidance, cost-benefit methods that value non-motorised and underserved users properly, and procurement and evaluation frameworks that hold projects to inclusive outcomes. 

Future Roads Funding Part II
17 November | 12:00 – 13:00

Road funding systems are coming under increasing structural pressure. Traditional revenue sources, particularly fuel taxation, are being eroded by improvements in vehicle efficiency and the transition towards electrification, while the cost of maintaining ageing and increasingly complex road assets continues to rise. 

At the same time, expectations of road networks are expanding. Governments and road authorities are being asked not only to preserve existing levels of service, but also to invest in climate resilience, decarbonisation, digitalisation, safety and network modernisation. The resulting challenge is therefore not simply a shortage of revenue, but a growing mismatch between what society expects road networks to deliver and the resources available to sustain them. 

Addressing this challenge requires first understanding its scale and causes. How large are existing maintenance and renewal liabilities? Which new investment requirements are genuinely additional? How much of the funding challenge can be addressed through better prioritisation and more efficient use of existing resources, and how much requires new sources of revenue? 

But diagnosis alone is insufficient. As established funding models become less sustainable, governments will need to consider how roads should be paid for in the future. Road user charging and distance-based pricing are increasingly part of that debate, raising important questions about fairness, public acceptability, governance, technology and the relationship between what users pay and what they receive in return. 

The two-part Future Roads Funding session therefore moves deliberately from diagnosis to action: Part I examines the scale and nature of the road funding challenge; Part II considers how funding systems can be modernised and what a new road funding social contract might look like. 

Forgiving Roadsides: Designing and Delivering What Works
17 November | 14:00 – 15:30 

Run-off-road crashes remain a major source of fatal and serious injury on road networks. When a vehicle leaves the carriageway, the consequences are determined not only by the circumstances of the crash but by what happens next: the space available for recovery, the presence of fixed objects or hazardous terrain, and whether road restraint systems and other protective measures have been appropriately selected, designed, installed and maintained. 

The Safe System approach starts from the premise that road users will make mistakes and that infrastructure should be designed so those mistakes do not result in death or serious injury. Applied to the roadside, this means managing risk systematically: wherever possible removing or reducing hazards, providing recoverable roadsides, and using appropriate restraint or protection where hazards cannot reasonably be eliminated. 

Yet delivering forgiving roadsides is rarely a matter of simply applying a standard solution. Road authorities and designers must make choices based on road environment, speed, traffic mix, available space, vulnerable road users, whole-life performance and local maintenance capacity. Solutions also need to perform as intended after installation and throughout their service life. 

This session brings together road authorities, engineers and industry practitioners to examine how roadside risk is translated into practical interventions. Through concrete examples and experience, it will explore how effective solutions are selected and designed, how standards and engineering judgement interact, and what it takes to deliver roadside safety measures that work in real-world conditions. 

Circularity in Road Infrastructure
17 November | 14:30 – 15:30

Circularity is emerging as a key principle in road infrastructure, driven by sustainability targets, material constraints and lifecycle cost considerations. The scale of the material challenge is easy to underestimate. Construction is the world’s largest consumer of raw materials, and sand and gravel — the aggregates that form the bulk of every road — are now the second most-extracted resource on the planet after water, at roughly 50 billion tonnes a year. At the other end of the life cycle, construction and demolition waste is already the largest waste stream in the European Union, accounting for more than a third of all waste generated. A sector that both consumes and discards on this scale cannot meet its climate and resource goals through efficiency at the margins alone. 

Beyond recycling, circular approaches require rethinking how roads are designed, built and maintained to maximise resource efficiency and minimise environmental impact. Recycling remains foundational — asphalt is technically close to fully recyclable, and reclaimed asphalt pavement is one of the most reused materials in the sector — but circularity is broader than reprocessing what has already been laid. It spans designing for longevity and disassembly, keeping materials at their highest value, substituting virgin aggregates and binders with secondary and bio-based alternatives, and treating a road as a long-lived material bank rather than a one-way flow from quarry to landfill. 

In practice, circular solutions still meet familiar barriers: specifications and standards written around virgin materials, procurement that rewards lowest first cost rather than lifecycle value, uneven quality and supply of secondary materials, and a shortage of data to prove long-term performance. Overcoming them is as much about contracts, standards and confidence as it is about technology. The economic case is increasingly clear — lower material costs, reduced exposure to raw-material price volatility and landfill charges, and longer asset life — but capturing it requires decisions to be taken across the whole life cycle rather than at the point of construction. 

This session brings together the parts of the value chain where circularity is actually being tested: recycled and secondary materials for asphalt, low-carbon and circular materials and binders, the bitumen industry’s work on reuse and longevity, circular approaches to roadside products such as noise barriers, and the perspective of the national roads industry putting these into everyday practice.  

Sustainability in Road Infrastructure
17 November | 16:00 – 17:30

Commitments to decarbonise infrastructure are now firmly in place. Governments, financiers and contractors have adopted net-zero targets, and the road sector has begun to account not only for the emissions of the vehicles it carries but for the carbon embodied in the infrastructure itself. That embodied footprint is substantial: cement production alone accounts for around 7–8% of global CO2 emissions,1 and the asphalt, aggregates and steel that make up a modern road add materially to the total across its full life cycle.2 Yet translating these commitments into tangible changes at project level remains uneven. 

Road projects are still too often designed and delivered without systematically integrating carbon, climate and environmental performance into core decision-making. Sustainability is frequently treated as a reporting exercise applied after the main design and procurement choices have been locked in, rather than as a criterion that shapes them. The result is a persistent gap between ambition set at policy level and outcomes delivered on the ground — the same delivery gap that runs through the Conference as a whole. 

This session focuses on how sustainability objectives are being operationalised: through design choices, material selection, procurement approaches and project evaluation frameworks that can demonstrate measurable outcomes. The questions are practical. How is whole-life carbon brought into the earliest design stages? How can procurement reward lower-carbon materials and methods without compromising durability or cost discipline? And what evaluation frameworks allow an authority to prove, rather than assert, that a project has performed against its environmental objectives? 

Co-organised with the World Road Association (PIARC), this session aims to explore what is genuinely being built differently today, what is holding wider adoption back, and how the sector can evidence measurable environmental performance across the life of a road. 

New Paradigm for Asset Maintenance
17 November | 16:00 – 17:30

Road authorities face a persistent asset management challenge: networks are ageing, maintenance needs are increasing and available budgets rarely keep pace. At the same time, expectations for network performance are rising, while climate change and more frequent extreme events are adding new pressures to infrastructure designed and built under different conditions. 

Traditional maintenance approaches based on periodic inspections, fixed intervention cycles and available annual budgets are increasingly giving way to more predictive and performance-based models. Better condition data, remote monitoring, digital inspection technologies and advances in analytics are allowing road authorities to understand asset condition more continuously, anticipate deterioration and intervene earlier. 

But more data does not automatically produce better asset management. The critical challenge is turning information into decisions: determining which assets require intervention, when intervention delivers the greatest whole-life value, and how limited resources should be prioritised across an entire network. New technologies also need to demonstrate that they improve decisions rather than simply generate additional data. 

This session will examine how road asset management is evolving in practice, from improved monitoring and predictive maintenance to risk-based prioritisation and new delivery models. It will explore how road authorities can use data and technology to move from finding and fixing problems to anticipating and managing asset performance over the whole lifecycle. 

Preparing Roads for Automation
18 November | 09:00 – 10:30

As automated driving moves from pilots to early deployment, the focus is shifting from vehicles to the readiness of road infrastructure. Roads must now function as integrated physical-digital systems, capable of supporting mixed traffic environments where human-driven and automated vehicles coexist.

This plenary will bring together infrastructure leaders, policymakers and industry to explore how road authorities can position themselves for this transition, ensuring that automation delivers safer, more efficient and more inclusive mobility outcomes.

Sustaining and Future–Proofing Roads in Emerging Markets
18 November | 11:00 – 12:30

Road investment remains central to economic development across emerging markets, supporting connectivity, trade and access to jobs and essential services. In many countries, substantial network expansion is still required to connect growing cities, rural communities and centres of economic activity. At the same time, governments must preserve and improve increasingly valuable existing road assets, often within tight financial and institutional constraints. 

The choices facing road authorities are also becoming more complex. Changing trade patterns, rapid urbanisation, climate pressures and geopolitical uncertainty are influencing where roads are needed and which connections are considered strategically important. At the same time, new technologies, data and analytical tools are creating opportunities to make better-informed decisions about where and how to invest. 

Against this backdrop, priorities differ significantly between countries and regions.  This session brings together perspectives from across emerging markets to explore how these different pressures are shaping road policies and investment programmes: what challenges countries are preparing for, where they are investing, and how their priorities are changing for the decade ahead. 

Digital Roads: Smarter Traffic Operations
18 November | 11:00 – 12:00

The availability and use of data is transforming how road networks are operated, shifting from reactive traffic management to real-time, to allow agencies to inform travelers and optimize or improve decision making. From collecting or obtaining data from third party sources to analytics to assess this information, road operators now have the opportunity to use tools to actively manage traffic, share travel condition information across the surface transportation system, and coordinate with other agencies. This session will focus on how the access and use of data offers opportunities for agencies to improve how they manage traffic, enabling safer, more efficient, andreliable travel.  

 Digital Roads: Safer Traffic Systems
18 November | 12:00 – 13:00

The availability and use of data is transforming how agencies assess and manage road networks to improve safety. This information is reshaping how road safety risks are understood, managed and reduced. Beyond traditional approaches based on historical crash data, new tools, such as behavioral monitoring and analytics, are enabling a more proactive and systemic approach to safety. This session will explore how obtaining and using data can support road authorities and operators identify risks earlier, intervene more effectively, and continuously improve safety.  

How Technology Is Changing Behaviour on the Road
18 November | 14:00 – 15:30

Technology and innovation is increasingly shaping how road users behave - whether through enforcement, in-vehicle systems, connected services, or delivery of travel condition information. From speed compliance to delivery of information to motorists, drivers behavior is being influenced by traffic management systems, roadway and travel condition information, traffic control devices, and other systems (e.g., in-vehicle information) which support or may influence the performance of drivers. This session will explore how data and technology is changing driver behavior on the road, what is proving effective in practice, and how these tools can support safer, more predictable and more efficient road use.  

Digital Roads: Digital Infrastructure Delivery
18 November | 14:30 – 15:30

Digitalisation is reshaping how road infrastructure is planned, designed and built. BIM, digital twins, connected construction sites, automated equipment and increasingly sophisticated data platforms offer the potential to improve design accuracy, coordination and productivity while reducing project risk, delays and costly rework. 

At the same time, digitalisation is moving beyond information management into physical delivery. Machine control, automation, connected work zones and AI-enabled equipment are beginning to change how construction itself is undertaken, with implications for productivity, quality and safety. 

The opportunity, however, goes beyond digitising individual tasks. The greater value lies in connecting information and decisions across the project lifecycle: creating a digital thread from planning and design through procurement and construction, and ultimately providing road operators with better information about the asset that has been delivered. 

This session will examine how digital approaches are being applied across road infrastructure delivery, focusing on the transition from digital design to connected, data-driven and increasingly automated construction. 

 Closing Session and Awards Ceremony
18 November | 15:30 – 17:00 

The Closing Plenary brings the IRF 2026 Annual Conference to a close by drawing together the insights, commitments and conversations of the previous three days. Reflecting on the conference theme, “The Road Ahead: Trust, Delivery and Innovation”, a high-level panel of leaders from the road sector will consider the key takeaways of the conference and share their outlook for the road sector in 2027 and beyond. The session also celebrates excellence and achievement across the global road community through the IRF 2026 Awards programme.