Development of a Sustainability Evaluation System for Culvert Replacement and Rehabilitation Projects

Abstract

As the number of deteriorated infrastructure assets, including culverts, continues to rise, there is a need to find the most cost-effective approaches to dealing with these assets. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that decisions cannot be made exclusively based on cost and that sustainability must also be considered. Although there exist a number of tools that allow environmental, societal, economic, and technical considerations to be assessed when evaluating alternatives for many infrastructure projects, there is no such tool for culverts. This paper describes the development of a culvert module for a commercially available assessment tool known as GoldSET. The environmental, societal, economic, and technical indicators used within the culvert module are introduced and described. The use of the tool is then demonstrated using two case studies that assess the viability of a traditional open-cut approach compared to trenchless approaches. For the two selected case studies, the trenchless approaches are found to be preferable except if considerations of technical uncertainties dominate the decision making.