U.S. Sustainable Roadbuilding Program Takes Cues From LEED

There’s a roadbuilding project under way in central Oregon that looks like so many others in recent years — creating a four-lane separated highway with a grassy median and wildlife underpasses from a four-lane road without separation.

The idea is to eliminate crossover accidents and wildlife crashes. But, perhaps as important, the job is a pilot project for a road rating system that is somewhat similar to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system for rating buildings.

It’s one of four pilots under way by the Oregon department of transportation using a standard known as Greenroads.

Greenroads is being developed by the University of Washington and engineering giant CH2M Hill, and it’s very much a work in progress even though the first version of it has already been published.

Like LEED, Greenroads evaluates a project using a number of criteria and awards points for each. And since road projects can be almost as widely varied as building projects, efforts have been made to address as wide a range as possible.

In Ontario, the Ministry of Transportation is piloting a program called Green Pave, based on similar U.S. programs, but it applies strictly to the paved surface of road projects.

Steve Muensch, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the university, said in an interview that for an urban project “you might spend a lot of time and effort building a surface that lasts decades with minimum maintenance or reduced tire noise.”

“In a rural environment, you might be more focused on treating stormwater and including wildlife crossings.”

Instead of developing a draft first version for review before it was used, Muensch and his colleagues decided to make their first version as complete as possible, issuing it as Greenroads v.1.0, ready for use as well as for comment.

That happened in mid-May, when the document was posted on the group’s website.

At the same time, about two dozen pilot projects large and small were set up to determine how well that first version of Greenroads works. The pilots thus became, in essence, a part of the review process.