Remote sensing and GIS techniques applied to highway planning: case study ring road project (RODOANEL) surrounding Sao Paulo metropolitan region, Brazil

This study presents a remote sensing and GIS application to analyze the ground appropriateness to locate and construct the Rodoanel highway, a ring road surrounding the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Region (SPMR). This study was made in close cooperation with the Sao Paulo State Department of Roads (DERSA). It corresponds to section 1 of Rodoanel, whose construction will start in 1998. This Road Department provided documents with several alternative locations for the Rodoanel, which is presently the most important highway construction project in Brazil. To evaluate the aptness of this area for huge civil engineering works, the authors made a map of land cover units using TM-Landsat (bands 1,4,7), which was associated to maps of slopes and geomorphology in a GIS environment.