Sustainable Highways: The challenges of the future

Road transport and infrastructure are keys to the evolution and prosperity of modern society. Connecting people and places, goods and services in safe, efficient, and sustainable way is essential for creating and maintaining sustainable and inclusive growth across society and the economy. A sustainable highway should satisfy lifecycle functional requirements of societal development and economic growth while reducing negative impacts to the environment and consumption of natural resources. In the future, highway infrastructure will face increasing pressures and impacts from a range of issues including changing weather patterns, population growth, capacity constraints, shortage of land and capital and rapidly changing technologies that outstrip the pace of new infrastructure development. From the other point, advanced technologies and intelligent transport solutions will play a significant impact on the transport solutions in the future. In this paper, the increasing environmental pressures that highway face and the new advanced technologies that might shape the highways infrastructure are presented.