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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 . |
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