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Cid Ornelas, Paula

University of British Columbia

U.S. federal infrastructure spending initiatives, such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), aim to address infrastructure gaps and promote economic growth. However, in light of the current climate crisis, it has become particularly important to quantify the environmental impact of policies, especially large-scale ones, such as the BIL. This thesis aims to take a first step towards understanding the benefits and consequences of increased infrastructure spending on a national level, by studying the effects of renewal spending on the condition of the U.S. Interstate system and the environment over a 20-year planning horizon. It relies on the U.S. Department of Transportation Highway Performance Monitoring System to characterize the relationship between Interstate highway expenditure, average daily traffic, and pavement condition via an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. The ARDL model outputs are embedded within a probabilistic life cycle assessment model to quantify the environmental impacts resulting from pavement-vehicle interaction (PVI) as a function of Interstate spending. In addition, an economic input-output life cycle assessment is conducted to compute the embodied environmental impacts associated with Interstate expenditures. The results highlight that increased infrastructure spending is expected to improve the physical condition of the U.S. Interstate system, but at the cost of increasing its environmental releases and global warming impact. Simply put, increased spending improves PVI-related environmental impacts for the Interstate system, but these savings are more than offset by anticipated increases in embodied (e.g., materials) impacts. The results of this work can support decision-makers in developing environmentally-informed infrastructure policy.

Text

2024-08-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89122

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/