01587890

Component

Roadway sustainability rating systems are a recognized way to communicate, quantify, and evaluate sustainability for roadway projects. In the literature they are principally scrutinized for their relationship to infrastructure practices. However, it is also useful to understand how they relate to the concept of sustainability itself. To do this, a standard sustainability framework is used to quantify the “sustainability scope” (breadth of sustainability addressed and the proportion addressing human, environment, and economic dimensions as well as other sub-categories) of four prominent sustainability rating systems applicable to roads (Greenroads, INVEST, Envision, CEEQUAL). All four are found to be remarkably similar with scopes that favor the environmental dimension significantly over the human and economic dimensions. A short list of sustainability ideas (healthy life, consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions) is found to dominate all four systems, while another group of common sustainability topics are relatively insignificant. Sustainability scope is relatively independent of credit weighting and impractical to substantially change. These findings have implications in future rating system design and refinement as well as the very nature of sustainability as the roadway industry sees it.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD40 Standing Committee on Transportation and Sustainability.

01584066

16-2184

English

25p

2016

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Evaluation and assessment; Highways; Infrastructure; Ratings; Sustainable development

Environment; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I15: Environment; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2016 Paper #16-2184

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 12 2016 4:58PM