Approaching road design from a sustainability perspective

• Published in: IOP conference series. Earth and environmental science Vol. 1337; no. 1; pp. 12043 - 12050
• Main Authors: Dagenais, T L, Chatterjee, A K, Pokharel, S K, Breault, M
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol IOP Publishing 01.05.2024
• Subjects: Construction industry; Costs; Design; Design factors; Geosynthetics; Green development; Industrial development; Infrastructure; Life cycle costs; Quality of life; Road design; Road maintenance; Roads; Sustainability; Sustainable design; Sustainable development
• ISSN: 1755-1307; 1755-1315
• DOI: 10.1088/1755-1315/1337/1/012043

Abstract The construction industry began emphasizing the three major pillars of sustainable development after the 1987 Brundtland Report. Sustainable design methodologies focus on life-cycle costs and the associated impacts of construction, operation, and maintenance. Maintaining road infrastructure accounts for a significant portion of the development budget owing to recurring costs, construction, and material extraction, while also resulting in other difficulties for the society. Poor road quality induce increased cost of living and degraded quality of life. Owing to front-end costs, road owners are typically motivated to pursue designs focused on the project’s initial cost. This is primarily attributable to a lack of understanding of sustainable development parameters. Life cycle cost attempts to quantify the environmental costs of sustainable construction. However, societal factors have been generally ignored. Currently, road section design is open to the designers’ choice of conventional unreinforced sections or a wide variety of planar and three-dimensional geosynthetic reinforcements. This study defined quantitative and scaled qualitative measures for designing road infrastructure using a sustainable approach. The methodology was explained using a full-scale real-life road project.