Oregon Project Is Case Study for ‘Green’ Road Standards

A highway improvement project that runs through a national park is serving as a test case for formalizing a road rating system similar to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design building rating system.

Photo: David Evans and Associates

The U.S. 97 Lava Butte-South Century Drive project in Oregon may be the first roadway to be officially rated “green.”

The 3.8-mile, $16-million U.S. 97 Lava Butte-South Century Drive upgrade in central Oregon runs through the Newberry National Monument. It is the furthest along of three projects the Oregon Dept. of Transportation will evaluate to determine if it will adopt standards set by Greenroads, unveiled by the University of Washington and CH2M Hill earlier this year.

The existing highway consists of four non-separated lanes. The project will create two lanes in each direction, separated by a grassy median. Two undercrossings for wildlife are being built.

The existing lanes will be used only for southbound traffic, while Knife River Corp., Bismarck, N.D., builds the new northbound lanes. “Crossover accidents were a big problem, as were wildlife crashes,” says Mike Hohbach, project manager for designer David Evans and Associates Inc. (DEA), Portland.

ODOT’s decision to compare the project against Greenroads occurred after final design, but DEA already had conducted environmentally crucial tasks, such as wildlife and plant surveys, says Scott Richman, DEA environmental task leader. Black-wire-mesh fencing will guide elk and deer toward the underpasses. The new lanes also pass over a cave, a local tourist attraction.

ODOT project manager Stephanie Serpico says that, when completed in 2012, “we will go back and grade it and see how it would have done if we’d had no idea of Greenroads.” Cut-down trees are reused on slopes, and reclaimed water from a sewer plant is used to control dust.

http:/www.greenroads.us Greenroads outlines minimum requirements to qualify, and it allows up to 118 points for voluntary actions such as minimizing light pollution and recycling materials. The full Greenroads document is available at .

Aileen Cho, ENR's senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in New York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Long Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.

Tim Newcomb is a newspaper and magazine journalist based in Western Washington, covering design and construction in buildings and transportation around the Northwest.