Greener Roads: Comparing Intelligent Transportation Systems with Construction-Phase Options to Reduce Emissions and Fuel Use

The research presented in this paper compares the direct emissions and fuel consumption savings of five different strategies for greener roads. Specifically, savings from an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), which is the integrated application of technology and management strategy to improve traffic flow and safety, is compared to savings from strategies focused on the construction phase including; using regionally provided materials, reducing fossil fuel use, reusing pavement, and using warm mix asphalt. The comparison was performed for a 10 mile segment of a key urban interstate in South Carolina. The analysis revealed that, in less than four years of operation, an ITS system focused on incident management will generally surpass the emissions and fuel consumption reductions of the construction-phase strategies. For an eight year repaving schedule, the ITS strategy provides fuel savings over 30 times larger and reduces carbon-dioxide emissions over five times more than any of the construction-phase strategies. These results suggest that policies and rating systems for more sustainable roads should weight ITS strategies considerably more than individual construction-phase strategies.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Tupper, Lee L
  • Chowdhury, Mashrur A
  • Klotz, Leidy
  • Fries, Ryan
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2011-1-23 to 2011-1-27
• Date: 2011

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 90th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Environment; Exhaust gases; Fuel consumption; Incident management; Intelligent transportation systems; Life cycle analysis; Pollutants; Resurfacing; Savings; Simulation; Sustainable transportation
• Identifier Terms: Greenroads (Rating system)
• Subject Areas: Environment; Highways; I15: Environment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01334669
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 11-4238
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Mar 31 2011 8:11AM