The concept of sustainability has been widely discussed in relation to human activity
and scientific development in recent times. There is an increased awareness of the
current and future ramifications of people’s everyday activities on the environment, and
sustainable development aims to mitigate these impacts, as well as promote social equity
and economic efficiency. A majority of research concerned with transportation
sustainability addresses it at the policy-planning level, though there have been recent
attempts at quantitatively evaluating it. These evaluations are mostly based on multicriteria
decision making processes using performance measures. However, the methods
and the performance measures developed are often not geared toward being practically
implemented within a transportation agency’s regular planning activities.
This research effort seeks to improve upon existing sustainability evaluation
processes for highways by proposing a methodology that addresses sustainability within
the regular transportation planning paradigm, rather than as a separate concern. A more
scientific approach to the scaling of various performance measures, as well as the
evaluation of current and future planning scenarios on a common basis provides for an
improved multi-criteria evaluation method. A case study was conducted using the
proposed methodology for a section of US Highway 281 in San Antonio, Texas. The
evaluation model developed in this study provides the basis for further research into
applying decision-making processes to improve transportation sustainability by
addressing some of the inherent drawbacks of existing research on sustainability
evaluation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2926 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Ramani, Tara Lakshmi |
| Contributors | Quadrifoglio, Luca |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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