Dynamic Sustainability Assessment of Road Projects

Traditionally, road projects are initiated based on an assessment of their economic benefit, after which the environmental, social and governance effects are addressed discretely for the project according to a set of predetermined alternatives. Sustainable road infrastructure planning is vital as issues like diminishing access to road construction supplies, water scarcity, Greenhouse Gas emissions, road-related fatalities and congestion pricing etc., have imposed severe economic, social, and environmental damages to the society. In the process of addressing these sustainability factors in the operational phase of the project, the dynamics of these factors are generally ignored. This paper argues that effective delivery of sustainable roads should consider such dynamics and highlights how different aspects of sustainability have the potential to affect project sustainability. The paper initially presents the different sustainability-assessment tools that have been developed to determine the sustainability performance of road projects and discuss the inability of these tools to model the interrelationships among sustainability-related factors. The paper then argues the need for a new assessment framework that facilitates modelling these dynamics at the macro-level (system level) and helping policymakers for sustainable infrastructure planning through evaluating regulatory policies.