Despite the huge sums budgeted by Sapporo for snow-related works, citizens express a high demand for improved winter road maintenance. Citizens include various segments, and understanding the needs of each segment helps to improve overall satisfaction. This study focused on businesses, essential to the economic strength of any city. Businesspeople were surveyed regarding winter traffic problems and desired outcomes for snow and ice control. The survey examined the importance of winter traffic issues; investigated winter-summer comparisons of vehicle-related costs, numbers of visits to clients, time taken to deliver merchandise, and number of visits by customers; and found winter traffic accidents in the past 5 years. Rankings of winter traffic issues were clarified by the expanded contributive rule for all respondents and for each business category. Despite some differences in ranking due to unique features of each business category, three problems ranked high for businesses of all categories: "risk of increased traffic accidents," "decline in visits to clients for meetings/sale," and "increase in time to deliver merchandise." The performance indicators that address these issues are "securing skid-resistance of winter road" and "securing effective road width." These indicators coincided with those ranked high by businesspeople in the opinion survey. Obtaining the achievement rates of indicator targets can enable us to measure outcomes of winter road maintenance. Public services aim to fulfill the needs of citizens, and organizing winter maintenance operations according to desired outcomes can promote this objective. We propose a logic model of winter road maintenance that incorporates the outcome indicators desired by businesses.
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