KORKY KOROLUK
correspondent
Reed Construction Data

 There’s a roadbuilding project under way in central Oregon that looks like so many others in recent years — creating a four-lane separated highway with a grassy median and wildlife underpasses from a four-lane road without separation.

The idea is to eliminate crossover accidents and wildlife crashes. But, perhaps as important, the job is a pilot project for a road rating system that is somewhat similar to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system for rating buildings.

It’s one of four pilots under way by the Oregon department of transportation using a standard known as Greenroads.

Greenroads is being developed by the University of Washington and engineering giant CH2M Hill, and it’s very much a work in progress even though the first version of it has already been published.

Like LEED, Greenroads evaluates a project using a number of criteria and awards points for each. And since road projects can be almost as widely varied as building projects, efforts have been made to address as wide a range as possible.

In Ontario, the Ministry of Transportation is piloting a program called Green Pave, based on similar U.S. programs, but it applies strictly to the paved surface of road projects.

Steve Muensch, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the university, said in an interview that for an urban project “you might spend a lot of time and effort building a surface that lasts decades with minimum maintenance or reduced tire noise.”

“In a rural environment, you might be more focused on treating stormwater and including wildlife crossings.”

Instead of developing a draft first version for review before it was used, Muensch and his colleagues decided to make their first version as complete as possible, issuing it as Greenroads v.1.0, ready for use as well as for comment.

That happened in mid-May, when the document was posted on the group’s website.

At the same time, about two dozen pilot projects large and small were set up to determine how well that first version of Greenroads works. The pilots thus became, in essence, a part of the review process.

The review process will be open until November, Muensch said, although that date could be extended if there are a lot of comments.

The comments will be evaluated, and a second version of Greenroads written, Muensch hopes, by sometime late in 2011.

Greenroads is only one of a dozen or so attempts being made to develop a standard for roads. Some are little more than lists of best practices.

Others are various forms of rating systems.

But Greenroads, since it has something of the look and feel of LEED, appears to be a frontrunner simply because so many people in the engineering and construction sectors are already familiar with LEED.

Meunsch said, however, that he believes that there will ultimately be several rating systems for roads.

“It will evolve as all market spaces tend to evolve,” he said, “and a number of them will have some sort of market space.”

In the meantime, the focus of Greenroads this year involves the pilot projects, “which are basically projects that agreed to take a look at the Greenroads performance metric and apply it to their project, and help us learn about how Greenroads works with projects.”

“In the end, this thing has to be useable by project engineers and contractors and designers, because it doesn’t matter how wonderful we think it is if nobody’s going to use it,” he said.

It's making gains as a road material amid price changes
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Karen Farkas
Plain Dealer Reporter

Asphalt and concrete have battled for road surface supremacy ever since both made their debut in the late 1800s.

Until now, asphalt ruled, being the material of choice on 90 percent of all U.S. roadways. But that's changing.

As asphalt prices rise with the cost of oil, concrete is becoming a viable option.

So much so that the Ohio Department of Transportation, in a rare move months ago, asked concrete contractors as well as asphalt companies to submit bids for its project to rebuild four miles of Ohio 2 in Lake County and add a third lane in each direction.

That's a departure from ODOT's practice of seeking bids for only one road surface material because of the amount of time and engineering details required in the bid process. It has been done only about a half-dozen times statewide.

The Ohio 2 bids were so competitive that they came in about $10 million less than the $95 million that ODOT engineers had expected, said Bonnie Teeuwen, deputy director of the district that includes Lake County. Anthony Allega Cement Contractor Inc. of Valley View and Great Lakes Construction Inc. of Hinckley were awarded the $85.8 million contract.

"It was surprising to us that the concrete bid was lower," said Lou Hazapis, one of the managers of the project, which got under way this month. "We have not done a lot of full-depth concrete pavement, but right now it is very competitive."

Concrete cost around $50 a square yard for years, said Brian Driscoll, chief highway engineer for Cuyahoga County. The price of a cubic yard of asphalt rose dramatically from about $70 two years ago to $160 last year.

The cost of asphalt for paving went up 17.4 percent between March 2008 and March of this year, while concrete increased 4.7 percent during that same time, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes.

Self Healing Cement Flexible Enough to Withstand Earthquakes Invented
Written by Dave Harcourt
Published on April 23rd, 2009

Posted in About Technology, In Global
  

Concrete that maintains itself by healing cracks improves the sustainability of infrastructure through its longer service life and lower maintenance inputs. Now researchers have developed flexible, self healing cement that won’t suffer catastrophic failure when strained in an earthquake.

We are so used to seeing maintenance teams working on our concrete buildings and structures that this expensive and carbon and energy intensive operation is taken for granted.

Publication Date: 04-APR-09
Author: Tom Ichniowski
ENR Online
      
Description:
As the $787.2-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) nears its two-month mark, federal agencies are picking up the pace in parceling out the measure’s estimated $130 billion for construction-related projects. The flow of funds, however, has been uneven. The Dept. of Transportation is in the fore-front obligating $4.7 billion in stimulus aid as of March 31. Most of that has gone to state highway agencies, which have begun to commit money and award construction contracts for specific projects.