Full Title: Economically and environmentally informed policy for road resurfacing: tradeoffs between costs and greenhouse gas emissions
Author(s): Darren Reger, Samer Madanat, and Arpad Horvath
Publisher(s): Environmental Research Letters
Publication Date: October 1, 2014
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Description (excerpt):
As road conditions worsen, users experience an increase in fuel consumption and vehicle wear and tear. This increases the costs incurred by the drivers, and also increases the amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) that vehicles emit. Pavement condition can be improved through rehabilitation activities (resurfacing) to reduce the effects on users, but these activities also have significant cost and GHG emission impacts. The objective of pavement management is to minimize total societal (user and agency) costs. However, the environmental impacts associated with the cost-minimizing policy are not currently accounted for. We show that there exists a range of potentially optimal decisions, known as the Pareto frontier, in which it is not possible to decrease total emissions without increasing total costs and vice versa. This research explores these tradeoffs for a system of pavement segments.