Chandigarh, July 15 -- : A Punjab Engineering College (PEC) professor's study on rural road accessibility in Meghalaya's hill terrain was presented at the World Conference on Transport Research in Toulouse, France, held from July 6 to 10. B Adinarayana, assistant professor in the civil engineering department, presented findings from a model developed to assess how terrain affects access to roads and public services in mountainous rural settlements. The study focused on West Garo Hills district, covering 1,176 rural habitations with a combined population of about 5.01 lakh. The research combined satellite imagery, digital elevation data, machine learning and stakeholder input to map accessibility across the district, achieving 89.7% accuracy in identifying habitations through remote sensing. It found accessibility levels varying nearly five fold across settlements, with 57.7% of habitations classified as having low or very low accessibility. The study found more than half the district's population lacks adequate access to essential public services. Settlements above 600 metres elevation accounted for 81% of the least accessible habitations, pointing to the terrain as a major factor limiting connectivity. The study also concluded that standard road connectivity measures tend to overstate actual accessibility in hilly regions, and argued for travel time-based indicators in planning rural infrastructure instead. htc...