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Hedonic pricing (HP) is an economic technique for placing monetary values upon costs or benefits which do not have market prices. This thesis applies the HP method to the valuation of road transport and visual disamenity impacts, as reflected in variations within property prices. In order to carry out such a study one has to determine not only the magnitude of the environmental impact at each property, but also structural, neighbourhood and accessibility variables characterising each property. These have to be controlled for before the portion of the property price attributable to the environmental variable can be observed. In the past all these variables have been calculated using labour intensive techniques such as house to house surveys. These led to high study costs and limited the scope of such research. This thesis circumvents these problems through the use of large scale digital data and a Geographical Information System (GIS). This study demonstrates how a GIS can significantly improve a HP study through the calculation of a wider range of more sophisticated variables. However the calculation of such a large number of variables causes difficulties when these data are modelled. This study illustrates how these problems can be overcome through a combination of Principal Components Analysis and a Multiple Regression. The final model had a higher degree of explanation and a lower incidence of collinearity than in previous research vindicating the use of GIS. Prices and values for a range of road transport and visual disamenity impacts are presented. The main limitations upon the research was the time and effort required to obtain data and to convert them into a GIS format. This took half of the research time. Various developments that might improve this situation in the future are presented, along with ways in which the study could be extended.

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Night time construction has adopted as a preferred method of scheduling to alleviate the problems caused by road works during the day. Over the past few years, night-time construction has been increased; it will inevitably continue to grow. Continued increase in the volume of roadwork done at night has resulted from a combination of road deterioration and traffic congestion. Although nighttime road construction is seen as the solution to alleviate the problems associated with day-time repairs and congestion, it has its own challenges and problems. Cost, productivity, quality, noise and human factors are some of the few factors that night-time road construction brings. This study is aimed at understanding the factors that influence the productivity of night-time construction and proposing strategies to improve productivity in the South African context. It is commonly known that quality and productivity differs from one roadwork site to another during night-time road construction. Some roadwork sites can perform well while others are worse off. However, through literature, the factors categorised as human, management and external may influence the productivity regardless of the operation. The current study investigates the influence of these factors on the productivity of work done at night through structured questionnaire. The results of the study show that there is minimal if no effect on the productivity of work done at night. Human factors that influence the performance of the labour have no impact on productivity, whereas management and external factors have minimal impact on the productivity of night-time road construction projects.