The layout of forest roads to access cut trees is often done manually in tropical forests, yielding suboptimal road networks with respect to the building cost. An alternative consists in using numerical optimization techniques to find a solution to this problem, also known as the multiple target access problem (MTAP). We used six numerical methods, three of which were found in the literature, to solve the MTAP. The six methods were compared on the basis on the building cost of the road network that they create, and on the basis of the computing time. They were used to solve randomly generated MTAP and also to solve a real case-study in an Indonesian rain-forest at Bulungan. The method that yielded the lowest building cost also required the longest computing time. Its computing time is actually so long that this method cannot be used in real situations. The fastest method poorly minimized the building cost. Among the four remaining methods, two methods were faster than the two others (by a factor 1.5 and 2). One of these two faster methods also yielded the lowest building costs among the four remaining methods.