Informing Sustainable Pavement Maintenance Policy with Environmental Cost

In Canada, sustainable transportation strategies such as changes in vehicle technology, travel patterns and fuel have been made to reduce vehicle emissions and their impacts on human health and the environment. However, recent studies show that pavement surface condition can have significant effect on transportation fuel consumption and emissions. The rolling resistance effect that occurs during vehicle and pavement interactions can lead to excess fuel consumption and consequent pollutant emissions. Thus, pavement management can provide opportunities to improve fuel economy, and reduce the associated air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from road transportation. A new Ontario-specific excess fuel consumption and environmental damage cost model recently developed to quantify the energy and environmental impacts from roads provides the opportunity to incorporate these effects in pavement management decisions. The proposed output-based environmental damage cost (EDC) models provide relationship covering environmental impacts of road surface and speed and the associated five atmospheric pollutants - Carbon dioxide, Carbon monoxide, Nitrogen oxides, Sulphur dioxide and Particulate matter 2.5um emissions from seven vehicle types. According to the model, at an average speed (80 km/h) a unit increase in IRI (1 m/km) can lead to $0.03 and $0.01 per kilometer of EDC for a passenger car and Truck emissions. A case study is presented to explore the effectiveness of EDC of road surface as a short-term policy. Main finding shows that potential savings from pavement roughness can be up to 17% while the application of only recycling retreatment accounts for about 15% of the potential savings.