Sustainable Practices for Project Delivery though Practical Solutions

This paper will discuss how every transportation project is developed to address specific needs that typically aim to resolve mobility and safety deficiencies and concerns. However, projects typically pass through communities and natural resources and therefore have the potential to affect them. Therefore, to properly design such transportation projects, the designer needs to develop a solution that will address the capacity and safety issues while considering the physical and human environmental needs. The concept of context sensitive solutions is a project development and geometric design approach that aims to balance safety, mobility, human, and environmental needs of a roadway design. There are a number of key design elements that have the potential to influence design choices and result in a significant impact on the developed design. At the same time, there are often conflicting elements in a design and a designer is called upon to develop a solution that will consider and address these elements by designing a roadway nonconforming to the full design values used up to that point. With the need for road safety and mobility improvements growing and the availability of funds for such improvement diminishing it is important to look at road design approaches more critically. In the past, roadway designs aimed at delivering the “best” project that could be designed often resulting in an over-designed roadway. Such an approach could lead to wasteful appropriation and reduced effectiveness of the limited available funds. The underlying idea of developing contextual and practical solutions is to equally consider and address all roadway issues. The designers and planners are therefore asked to develop an appropriate solution and design that satisfies all. This may indeed necessitate the consideration of alternatives that could initially not be viewed as appropriate. Such alternatives may include the examination of an undivided facility, which may affect expected safety levels, the use of fewer lanes, which may affect expected capacity and mobility, or the use of narrower lanes, which may affect expected safety and capacity levels. The basic notion of practical solutions is the need to examine such non-typical approaches wherever they are required and determine how each of the roadway-shaping issues would be addressed in the final design. It is therefore apparent that the need for innovation and creative design is paramount in developing such practical solutions.

• Record URL:
  • https://aetransport.org/past-etc-papers/conference-papers-pre-2009/conference-papers-2010
• Corporate Authors:

  Association for European Transport (AET)

  1 Vernon Mews, Vernon Street, West Kensington
  London W14 0RL,    
• Authors:
  • Stamatiadis, N
• Conference:
  • European Transport Conference, 2010
  • Location: Glasgow Scotland, United Kingdom
  • Date: 2010-10-11 to 2010-10-13
• Publication Date: 2010

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Pagination: v.p.
• Monograph Title: European Transport Conference, 2010 Proceedings

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Construction projects; Environmental impacts; Highway design; Mobility; Planning and design; Project delivery; Project management; Sustainable development; Transportation planning
• Subject Areas: Design; Transportation (General); I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01351667
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Sep 14 2011 11:12AM