# Rural Road Assessment Method for Sustainable Territorial Development
## 5 Conclusions  
This article proposes a mechanism to prioritize the improvement of rural roads based on their contribution to territorial sustainability before the stages of design or construction. This method emphasizes and connects the short-term and long-term analysis through the interaction of the sustainability indicators for a territory. The mechanism is associated with a multi-criteria assessment model based on a three-stage structure: a static analysis, a dynamic analysis, and a prioritization. The method was illustrated through a case study with a sample of 101 rural roads in a Chilean context. The implementation of this mechanism enabled the differentiation of the contributions to territorial sustainability from various rural roads and distinct locations. Although the contribution to the technical, economic, environmental, and social dimensions does not exceed 20% in most of the sample evaluated, some roads stand out above the interquartile range of the sample, unidimensionally. After optimization, an efficient set of roads was selected to simultaneously achieve the maximum social, environmental, technical, and economic contribution. Following a dynamic assessment of the fifteen best roads, two were identified (_R35_, _S907_) that, by their progressive behavior over the long term, reduce their deviation from an ideal point of maximum contribution, as defined by enhancing the economic criteria. Thus, the assessment mechanism identifies rural road infrastructure in terms of its current sustainable contribution to the territory and its long-term performance. This proposal supports early decision making regarding infrastructure projects and their location from the point of view of their contribution to sustainability. In this sense, it can be a tool to support public agencies charged with rural infrastructure investments and to promote the development in different geographic settings that do not fit the on-demand criteria of the national investment system. In fact, the method can be applied prior to the construction and design of a project to select the most relevant infrastructure alternatives to a context by virtue of their sustainability. Therefore, this method can help public agencies rank the roads that need to be the subject of development projects. This method can be reproducedin different geographical contexts by tailoring the assessment model to the characteristics of local, regional, and specific infrastructure types. The general results of this study are subject to the geographic context of the application and the specific characteristics of a set of roads. That is, the evaluation model conditions the value criteria for a geographic context. This condition implies differences regarding the degree of importance of different communities' criteria and indicators and the weight of their interactions. In this way, the evaluation structure and the interaction model are prior studies necessary for the proposed mechanism's operation. From this, the described mechanism can be applied to any geographic context. In addition, remembering that prioritizing depends on the projects to be assessed is essential. The optimization and prioritization system are conditioned to the set being evaluated. Therefore, the same project evaluated at different moments with different project sets does not ensure the same selection answer or the same place of prioritization. Based on the proposed mechanism and the evaluation structure, we intend to advance along two lines of work in the future. First, to guarantee the total connectivity network with a contribution to territorial sustainability, it is necessary to integrate the analysis of rural bridges. Second, the models should be associated with artificial intelligence algorithms to identify profiles of efficient rural network projects that facilitate the work of the design teams of public agencies.