A Review of Highway Agencies in the South Asia Region

A Review of Highway Agencies in the South Asia Region
C 3 Sweden
C.3.1 Introduction to Roads in Sweden
Classification of Roads and Management
The road network in Sweden can be classified into the following types:
State roads (98,400 km);
Municipal roads (41,00 km); and
Private roads (284,000 km).
Until recently, Sweden maintained vertical separation of its modes of transportation. The
Swedish Road Administration (SRA) was the lead agency for the country’s road network.
As SRA was responsible for national and regional roads, there are only a few other road
infrastructure providers with whom it dealt. Although 90 percent of the almost 300
municipalities have responsibility over some of the roads in the most populated areas, this
basically only concerns the municipalities of major cities. No counties or unincorporated
areas exist in Sweden. Cooperation with local government is needed for traffic management
and maintenance works, but SRA also built close contact with local governments on
other issues. Using outreach, promotion of best practices, benchmarking, small grants to
encourage behavior, and continuous dialog, SRA extended national government objectives
into the practices, processes, and projects of the local municipalities. A substantial part of
the Swedish road network is in private hands, largely in those of timber companies. The
maintenance of some of these roads was being subsidized by SRA in view of their availability
for public transport services.
Although, independently, the separate transport modes became quite developed, synergies
were needed to bring the transport network as a whole to the next level. So, in April 2010,
the Swedish Transport Administration (STA) was established to bring the management
of road, rail and transport communications under one roof. The Swedish Rail and Road
Administrations as well as the Swedish Institute for Transport and Communications Analysis
have been phased out.
Restructuring of the transport network was aimed at strengthening the management of the
transport system. Clarity was provided to roles, responsibilities and targeted outputs of the
lead agency as well as the core group of ministries and agencies to be involved. Changes
brought about to the three main supporting bodies for the road network are:
The Swedish Transport Agency was established by Swedish Parliament to enforce
public authority for the entire transport sector, taking over tasks of the Traffic Registry,
Road Traffic Inspectorate and parts of SRA’s public authority activities;
Vägverket Produktion, engaged in construction, operation and maintenance of road and
civil works projects, would become corporatized under the name Svevia; and
SRA Consulting Services was planned to join Banverket Consulting as a state company
called Vectura Consulting AB.
In addition, Transport Analysis is a separate entity responsible for the evaluation of facts,
statistics and other data for the decision-making process.
Much of the documentation on road transport matters used in this report largely refers to
SRA. For convenience, both the activities and performance as currently carried out by the
STA or in the past by the SRA are described here.
Utilization of the Network
Over the past decade, road transport has continued to make up a large part of total
transport mileage in Sweden. Passenger transport mileage by road was 79.4 percent in
1999, compared with 86.6 percent in 2008. Utilization here is measured by the number
of km driven by vehicles on each type of road. While state roads comprised only about a
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