A Sustainability Approach in Road Project Evaluation, Case-Study: Pollutant Emission and Accident Costs in Cost Benefit Analysis

Abstract

Sustainability issues are often viewed as fancy topics that are interesting only to academia. It is necessary to bring such ideas into daily engineering practice through easy and straightforward methodologies. In this study we dealt with two aspects of sustainability in road project evaluation practices: pollutant emissions and losses associated with traffic accidents. In addition to the traditional costs and benefits associated with such projects, we propose a methodology to convert such sustainability impacts into currency units. This would enable conducting an apples-to-apples comparison when analyzing different projects. This was made possible by localizing some international research findings to reflect conditions where this case-study was undertaken.