Quantifying the Sustainability Scope of Roadway Sustainability Rating Systems
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.
-
Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD40 Standing Committee on Transportation and Sustainability.
-
Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Muench, Stephen T
- Kosonen, Heta
- Veeravigrom, Manisa
- Yamaura, Julian
- Lew, James
-
Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2016-1-10 to 2016-1-14
- Date: 2016
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 25p
- Monograph Title: TRB 95th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Evaluation and assessment; Highways; Infrastructure; Ratings; Sustainable development
- Subject Areas: Environment; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I15: Environment; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01587890
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 16-2184
- Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
- Created Date: Jan 27 2016 5:12PM