Center for Humans and Nature

Dennis Dreher, M.S., Weighs in on Road Question: To Build or Not to Build. . .

December 10th, 2011

By Enhancing Green Infrastructure

Highway design traditionally has been regimented to focus on “hard” engineering approaches to efficiently convey traffic and deal with incidental concerns like the movement of stormwater. Evolving national environmental regulations and regional concerns over flooding and groundwater have begun to push designers of roadways and other “gray infrastructure” systems to consider alternative approaches. This has led to a consideration of more holistic “green infrastructure” designs that not only provide environmental benefits, but may save money in the process.

Green infrastructure has been championed by Chicago Wilderness, a regional consortium of more than 250 public and private organizations that work together to restore local nature and improve the quality of life. Green infrastructure also has been embraced by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning as a core theme of the recently adopted GO TO 2040 Plan.

So, what does green infrastructure mean in the context of roadway planning and design? Green infrastructure is used to describe products, technologies, and practices that use natural systems—or engineered systems that mimic natural processes—to enhance overall environmental quality and provide more sustainable utility services. More specifically, it includes techniques such as porous pavement, rain gardens, and vegetated swales that use soils and vegetation to infiltrate and/or recycle stormwater runoff. On a larger scale, green infrastructure refers to strategically planned and managed networks of natural lands, working landscapes, and other open spaces that conserve ecosystem values and functions and provide associated benefits to human populations.

Following are several brief examples of recommended green infrastructure approaches in the context of proposed roadway projects.

Preserving Ecosystems: The northeastern Illinois landscape contains an abundance of sensitive natural communities, including lakes, stream corridors, wetlands, prairies, and woodlands. Some of these systems have been identified as regionally significant “resource protection areas” in the Chicago Wilderness Green Infrastructure Vision. Highway projects have the potential to damage such systems directly, as well as fragment wildlife habitats and adversely affect critical water flows. The siting of the road rights of way should attempt to minimize direct ecosystem impacts and fragmentation. It also is recommended that highway planners work with local and regional conservation agencies to design plans for habitat damage mitigation, enhancement of ecosystem connectivity, and wildlife movement that take into account regional biodiversity considerations and opportunities. This task should include the development of refined inventories and maps of existing and potential green infrastructure in the project vicinity.

Protecting Water: Roadway construction can dramatically increase stormwater runoff, resulting in increased flooding, water pollution, and reduced groundwater recharge. In response to such concerns, most counties in northeastern Illinois have developed comprehensive ordinance requirements that address both runoff quantity and quality. These provisions should be used as a starting point for roadway and stormwater design. However, it is suggested that local watershed plans also be utilized so that specific pollutants of local concern and local hydrologic considerations are used as the basis for optimizing the design of best management practices (BMPs). Further, it is recommended that state-of-the-art national guidelines and research be utilized in selecting and designing the most effective BMPs to address the locally identified water quality and hydrologic concerns. Finally, it is recommended that a green infrastructure theme be used for the design of roadway and water management systems. Simply put, such designs would minimize impervious surfaces and treat water at the source using soils and cleansing vegetation. This approach would value water as a resource, not a waste product to be disposed.

Enhancing Landscapes: Traditional roadway designs contain rights-of-way that feature turf grass and ornamental shrubs and trees that often bear no resemblance to local native landscapes. Such landscapes can be expensive to maintain and offer little in the way of ecosystem services or visual appeal. As a consequence, suburban roadways in Illinois look much like roadways in Atlanta, New York, or almost anywhere in the country. A recommended alternative is natural landscaping that utilizes appropriate native grasses, forbs, trees, and shrubs to create an ecologically functional and aesthetically appealing corridor that reflects a local sense of place. The extensive use of deep-rooted native vegetation also can help to mitigate the impacts of climate change by acting as a carbon sink. Natural landscaping was recently incorporated into a “green roadway” system for a four thousand-acre intermodal project in Joliet. Other midwestern states such as Iowa have provided leadership in the natural landscaping movement through a Department of Transportation Living Roadway Trust Fund. One important proviso is that mechanisms must be adopted for the ecologically sustainable, long-term maintenance of natural landscapes so that installed landscapes thrive and corridors do not become routes for the spread of invasive species.

Green Infrastructure in Surrounding Communities: While much of the focus of new regional roadways is on mitigating the direct effects of the road corridor, far greater impacts may potentially be caused by the spin-off development spurred by the roadway. That is why it is critical that neighboring communities also consider green infrastructure principles in their plans and ordinances. At a minimum, these communities should consider green approaches to stormwater management, landscaping, and infrastructure designs as mentioned above. They should promote green infrastructure in neighborhoods, school grounds, and back yards. They should consider integrated approaches to open space and natural area protection, greenway connections, and trail and bikeway planning. These initiatives should be done not just to counteract potential adverse effects of the roadway, but to build communities that are more walkable, livable, and ultimately more healthy. Chicago Wilderness, through its Sustainable Watershed Action Team (SWAT) has supported the development of green infrastructure plans in several counties and communities that could serve as models for other communities in the region. These include the Mettawa/Lincolnshire/Riverwoods planning area, McHenry County, and the cities of Crystal Lake and Woodstock.

In conclusion, the design of a potential new roadway provides an exciting opportunity to embrace green infrastructure as a core theme. Green infrastructure reflects a fundamental paradigm shift that minimizes environmental impacts, enhances community livability and sense of place, and also has the potential to reduce construction and maintenance costs. While there are numerous green infrastructure references, a good starting point on northeastern Illinois principles and practices is the Ecological Planning and Design Directory: http://www.chicagowilderness.org/sustainable/directory_documents.php

Christopher Preston, Ph.D., Weighs in on Road Question: To Build or Not To Build. . .

December 9th, 2011

BY KEEPING VALUES IN MIND

Big public infrastructure decisions are often couched in terms of comparing costs and benefits. Highway projects pitch commute times against the destruction of wetlands or potential economic development against the integrity of small communities. Though there are differences of opinion about how to quantify the pluses and minuses (especially as these measures stretch far into the future), the decision-making frame is essentially thought to be mathematical. It is what we believe big public decisions are about.

The mathematical framing, however, leaves out a central issue. Large-scale infrastructure forms the material within which we live our lives. For those of us who don’t live in the backwoods (and for some who do), roads, homes, city parks, and shopping centers all form our immediate environment, the place within which we forge our lifestyles. We interact with this material structure continuously and inevitably. Philosophers have said that there is “a strange but necessary connection between place and mind.” Part of what this means is that the physical setting with which we surround ourselves is not a neutral and passive background for human life, but an active and determining influence on us. It gets into our minds and shapes our conception of the world. This is part of what makes up a person’s “sense of place,” an embracing of what is embodied in a particular geography.

People like to say that nature “speaks to” them. In fact, all environments—natural and built—constantly speak to us. Part of the language they speak is the language of values. Infrastructure embodies values and reflects them back at us, immersing us in what they say. Values are “made material” in infrastructure, carrying messages about how to live. The way we build, then, even when we build something as instrumental as a road, needs to be “value-sensitive.” Choices made about road building are not just choices about costs and benefits, they are long-range statements about the values in which we choose to immerse ourselves and our children. They will dictate where to focus our attention and what to dwell upon. The material structure of the highway system will instruct us in what to take as significant in our lives.

In order to make a design project value-sensitive, a number of deep questions about goals and metrics of success need to be asked. These questions include: What outcomes would constitute success for this project? How does the technical success of this project differ from social or ecological success? Which aspects of design could be altered in order to increase success, broadly defined? Rather than evaluate the road in terms of surface costs and benefits, it is necessary to probe the values the road might speak back to its users over the generations.

The probing might look like this:

Is the purpose of the road to increase quality of life? Do we have agreement about what quality of life means? Does it mean allowing people to live as far away from their work as possible, with the desired outcome being to make this one regrettable part of the day—the commute—as short as possible? What is at stake when people separate where they live from where they work? What does it mean to “relieve congestion”? Will the road solve or postpone this problem? When something is relieved, what is depressed? Are the values that are gained similar to the values that are lost? Is the public informed about how to meaningfully compare them? Will this road make us better or worse people? Will it build community or fragment it? Whose interests are being represented in the desire to spur economic growth?

If a road is built, which values will the infrastructure speak back to its users over the next several generations? Will it speak of efficiency, dreariness, community, or joy? Will the road increase options, or will it reduce them? Will the road be given a chance to ask each driver “might you be better off in a train?” Will the road be designed to showcase or erase the landscape? Occasionally, a road can be aesthetically positive (e.g., the Going-to-the-Sun Highway in Montana and the Southern Appalachians’ Blue Ridge Parkway). Is there a way to make the outcome of “road work” beautiful? How might a road be designed to enhance a sense of place? Will the road speak to the importance, the history, and the interest of its various destinations with unusual signs and local information, or will it serve only as an artery with a smooth, fast flow and little else? Will the road be designed to maximize speed or to maximize interest? Will the road impose itself on the landscape, or will it respond to the shape of landscape? Will the road respect diversity (of people and of place) or eliminate it? Will it be a source of pride to anyone but the engineer?

A framing that probes the deeper values at work is the way decisions concerning public infrastructure should be made. These values need to be solicited from the public through as much community involvement as possible. The idea that a certain percentage of the population “support” the road and others “do not” is only minimally useful information. Designers need to know what the public support and what they want built. Importantly, these wishes need to be informed by the highest aspirations of what is possible. Artists, visionaries, and philosophers need to inspire the public with images of the rich potential of this important piece of public infrastructure. The most enthusiastic vision of what is possible needs to be promulgated so that people are not making choices between yes and no, but between value sets that enhance both community and nature.

The built environment matters profoundly for the constraints it imposes and the opportunities it provides. It plays a role in creating or destroying a sense of place. A two-billion-dollar construction project shaping the landscape for the next hundred years that says only “here is a way to surround you in concrete as you speed between point A and B” would be a moral failure, even at the same time as it might be an engineering success.

Carson Poe and Julianne Schwarzer Weigh in on the Road Question: To Build or Not to Build. . .

December 6th, 2011

By Planning Roads at an Ecosystem Scale and Integrating Sustainable Features

Today, only a limited number of infrastructure projects in the United States are new roads. In fact, more than nine out of ten highway projects that require evaluation under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) are classified as categorical exclusions, and thus are actions considered to involve no significant environmental impacts, based on a precedent that the environmental review of similar actions has set.[1]

The only way to ensure that critical environmental and cultural resources are protected when a new road is built is to select an alignment that avoids them. Certain circumstances require roads to be constructed in or near sensitive resources; for example, a region may need a new road to respond to changes in population and land use, to replace obsolete facilities, to provide equitable access to transportation, or to facilitate economic development. A new road may also be necessary to enhance safety and emergency preparedness. For purposes such as these, the public’s need for safe and efficient transportation solutions must be taken into account.

When a region determines that building a new road is in the best public interest, the transportation delivery process presents at least two broad types of opportunities to honor the landscape: those possible through the transportation-planning and environmental-permitting processes, and those possible through the application of certain technological, operational, and design features. Regarding the first opportunity, the transportation-planning and environmental review processes historically existed in separate spheres, but the state of the practice has changed and the use of an “integrated planning” approach is helping transportation and environmental practitioners to examine natural resource concerns prior to formal transportation-planning activities. By exploring environmental, economic, and other societal goals during the planning process and then carrying them through project development, design, and construction, resulting road projects can better reflect the priorities of the community and relevant agencies.

When assessing infrastructure projects within a given region, integrated planning allows agencies with different missions and areas of expertise at local, state, and federal levels to collaborate. Together, they can identify critical ecological resources and mitigation opportunities and then select the most ecologically appropriate alignment. In cases where key resources cannot be avoided, the agencies can develop a list of mitigation options within the same ecosystem or watershed, while also creating a plan for infrastructure features that may lessen any negative environmental impacts of the road. Some of these features are new techniques that transportation agencies have demonstrated through recent research, while others have been available for many years but not regularly applied

It is those features that can help roads of the present and future “look” and perform better than some roads may have in the past. For example, transportation agencies can install erosion, sediment, and run-off control measures to ensure that stormwater impacts resulting from new roads are alleviated. Transportation agencies might also implement policies or pricing strategies that reduce idling times in order to address air quality issues or to attempt to manage congestion. In other scenarios, transportation agencies can use unpaved portions of roads that are beyond the “clear zone,” or area necessary to ensure traveler safety, to sequester carbon or grow biocrops via alternative management practices for the native vegetation already present at the site of the road. When the proposed new road is located in a landscape where the new infrastructure might cause habitat fragmentation, disrupt migration patterns, or split species populations, measures such as well-designed box culverts, wildlife overpasses/underpasses, and wildlife fencing can be installed to support habitat connectivity and to help offset other negative impacts of the road. Additionally, some transportation agencies are piloting ways to put new roads to work generating power through incorporating renewable energy technologies—including solar panels, wind turbines, and geothermal devices—into roadway design. The rapidly maturing state of the practice suggests renewable energy applications within highway right-of-way can promote energy security, reduce emissions, and foster the creation of local green job markets.

All of these considerations create a series of trade-offs that a region will need to balance with its stated values when building a road is the best approach to meeting the need for a proposed project within a region. If a region decides that a road should be built, an evaluation approach should be put in place to assess the relative success of that road in honoring the landscape and achieving other goals. This mechanism should be articulated during the project planning stage to ensure that goals are not selectively met; it will serve as a reminder of the intent of the project to be environmentally sensitive, while requiring the agencies involved to measure whether decisions have ultimately accomplished what the public need warrants and the community has affirmed.