01587631

Component

https://doi.org/10.3141/2589-01

The rapid growth in popularity of sustainable roadway certification systems suggests that a holistic evaluation of rating systems and a retrospective examination of sustainable roadway practices are warranted. Regardless of underlying sustainability definitions guiding any transportation project rating system, literature reveals that there is little consensus on how rating systems should ultimately weigh human, environmental, and economic needs relative to each other. This research is the first effort to use documented project certification data, a unique data set consisting of 28 Greenroads certified projects, to investigate the state of practice of sustainability rating systems and sustainable construction practices. By using quantitative and qualitative analyses, this study identifies and explores common strategies used by project teams to achieve sustainability under the Greenroads rating system. This study argues that sustainable projects make a quantifiable difference in performance compared with typical projects. However, projects that pursue independent third-party sustainability certification should strategize their expectations and manage performance expectations accordingly because this research shows that self-evaluations overestimate final scores by an average of 15%. Although the Greenroads framework allows for many combinations of scores, certified projects exhibit score breakdowns similar to both the rating system and other certified projects. Because the majority of points awarded by Greenroads is limited to a subset of core credits, this study proposes that sustainable practices revolve around current standards of practice, perceived practicality, or economic benefits. Future research should focus on identifying similar patterns in other roadway sustainability rating systems to explore the gap between sustainable knowledge and practice.

01589874

16-4844

English

pp 1–13

2016

Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

9780309369916

Print

Figures (4) ; References (19) ; Tables (5)

Construction projects; Pavement management systems; Performance measurement; Ratings; Road construction; State of the practice; Sustainable development

Greenroads (Rating system)

Construction; Design; Environment; Highways; Pavements

PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 12 2016 6:07PM

• Computational Technique for Detecting Errors in Network-Level Pavement Condition Data
• Developing a Correlation Between the Pavement Condition Ratings Used by Five Federal Lands Management Agencies
• Evaluating Needs of Road Maintenance in Sweden with the Mixed Proportional Hazards Model
• Global Procedure for Temperature Adjustment of Measured Pavement Deflection Data: Based on the Long-Term Pavement Performance Seasonal Monitoring Program
• Hybrid Modeling Approach for Quantifying Maintenance and Rehabilitation Treatment Effectiveness of Asphalt Pavements
• Imperfect Preventive Maintenance Strategy for Flexible Pavements Based on Threshold Reliability, Cost Optimization, and Mechanistic–Empirical Analysis
• Influence of Pavement Condition Data Variability on Network-Level Maintenance Decision
• Methodology for Determining Performance Life of Hot-Mix Asphalt Mixtures
• Model Development, Field Section Characterization, and Model Comparison for Excess Vehicle Fuel Use Attributed to Pavement Structural Response
• Prediction of Pavement Performance: Application of Support Vector Regression with Different Kernels
• Rational Procedure for Determination of Rut Depth Intervention Level in Network-Level Pavement Management
• Road Section Length Variability on Pavement Management Decision Making for Ontario, Canada, Highway Systems
• Seed-Based Approach for Automated Crack Detection from Pavement Images
• Three-Stage Least Squares Analysis of Postrehabilitation Pavement Performance
• Use of Connected Vehicles to Characterize Ride Quality
• Use of Three-Dimensional Pavement Surface Data to Analyze Crack Deterioration: Pilot Study on Georgia State Route 26
• Validation of Dynamic Simulation of Slow-Moving Surface Deflection Measurements