The Role of the County Surveyors Society and the J.R.G.

My task in this seminar on Research in Surface Transport is to put the practitioner's point of view. Research can, if left to researchers, get very 'heady'. It is aposite therefore to question whether research in general in the field of Road Transport meets the needs of the practicing Transport Planner and Engineer? Perhaps even more important, does i t address the requirements of the customer? By customer I mean user of our roads rather than client organisations.

In researching the background information (which was required reading for the author to clarify hfs thoughts) the opposite happened! The volume of paper information available on the subject of managing research is so confusing that he is left in no doubt that the 'research industry' is not very good at handling its own affairs. There is no corporate R& D management plan, setting of objectives or monitoring results for effectiveness. It is however good at producing a lot of interesting but unco-ordinated reports. Within this jungle of information the poor old practicing transport planner and engineer has to fend for himself! Let me attempt to guide the reader through the jungle. My paper will seek to provide a