Green Highways Partnership

Green Highways Partnership Logo

The Green Highways Partnership (GHP) is a voluntary, public/private initiative that organized to transform the United States’ transportation infrastructure. Through concepts such as integrated planning, regulatory flexibility, and market-based rewards, GHP seeks to incorporate environmental streamlining and stewardship into all aspects of the highway lifecycle.¹

Goal

GHP originally formed to transform transportation infrastructure through environmental streamlining and stewardship, within the mid-Atlantic region, including New Jersey and New York. By creating a precedent for cross-sector partnering and integrated planning to achieve this ambitious goal, GHP is trying to lay the groundwork for nationwide transferability.

Strategy

With an extensive network of environmental, industrial and governmental collaborators, GHP advocates active cooperation and regulatory progressiveness to move beyond the current paradigm. The combined resources of its partner base allow Green Highways to ensure that sustainability becomes the driving force behind infrastructure development.²

The benefit of a large and diverse partner base is that each partner can contribute constructive insight to all stages of the green highway lifecycle process. The differences between a green highway and a traditional highway begin at the very first stage of this process: planning. The scope of green planning is expansive; it must incorporate each and every perspective that will be impacted by the construction of a highway. Therefore, a green highway is built on a foundation of integrated planning, which facilitates and optimizes communication between all GHP partners. In order to accomplish this daunting planning process, GHP often utilizes a charrette process. Charrettes bring in a diverse background of participants to assure full discussion of issues, interrelationships, and impacts. Its time limits challenge people to rapidly, openly, and honestly examine the problem and help potential adversaries reach consensus on an appropriate solution.³

What Makes a Highway Green?

A green highway integrates transportation functionality and ecological sustainability. The result is a highway that will benefit transportation, the ecosystem, urban growth, and surrounding communities. Green highways are:

• built with permeable materials that provide superior watershed-driven stormwater management, thus preventing metals and toxins from leaching into streams and rivers

• constructed with recycled materials, thereby reducing landfill usage

• designed using cutting-edge technologies to protect critical habitats and ecosystems from the encroachment of highway infrastructure⁴

Though this is not an exhaustive list, green highway qualities include:

• Providing a net increase in environmental functions and values of a watershed.

• Going beyond minimum standards set by environmental laws and regulations.

• Identifying and protecting historic and cultural landmarks.

• Mapping all resources in the area in order to avoid, identify, and protect critical resource areas.

• Using innovative, natural methods to reduce imperviousness, and cleanse all runoff within the project area.

• Maximizing use of existing transportation infrastructure, providing multi-modal transportation opportunities, and promoting ride-sharing/public transportation.

• Using recycled materials to eliminate waste and reduce the energy required to build the highway.

• Linking regional transportation plans with local land use partnerships.

• Controlling populations of invasive species, and promotion the growth of native species.

• Incorporating post project monitoring to ensure environmental results.

• Protecting the hydrology of wetlands and streams channels through restoration of natural drainage paths.

• Resulting in a suite of targeted environmental outcomes based upon local environmental needs.

• Reducing disruptions to ecological processes by promoting wildlife corridors and passages in areas identified through wildlife conservation plans.

• Encouraging smart growth by integrating and guiding future growth and capacity building with ecological constraints.⁵

Green Highway Technologies

Green highway construction can incorporate several technical elements including but not limited to:

1. Bioretention swales⁷

2. Porous pavement shoulders⁸

3. Environmentally friendly concrete⁹

4. Preserved forest buffer¹⁰

5. Restored and stormwater wetlands¹¹

6. Stream restoration¹²

7. Wildlife crossing¹³

8. Soil amendments¹⁴

Background

The roots of the Green Highway Partnership run back to 2002, when the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) named environmental stewardship and streamlining one of three “vital few” goals (along with safety and congestion mitigation.) This marked the beginning of a new era; substantial FHWA investments resulted in a wave of environmentally-focused programs such as Context Sensitive Solutions, the Exemplary Ecosystem Initiative, and others. The need to consolidate the myriad aspects involved in the “greening” of U.S. highways soon became glaringly evident. The FHWA consulted the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Mid-Atlantic Region 3 and determined that the effort would require an interconnected, multidisciplinary organization. To be effective, it would need to utilize market-based incentives that went beyond the traditional approaches. After an executive planning charrette and culminating forum, followed by a retreat, the Green Highways Partnership was brought to life.

Charrette

In June 2005, EPA’s Mid-Atlantic region hosted an Executive Planning Charrette in Philadelphia, PA, to define and establish a vision for the Green Highways Partnership. More than 50 leaders and senior-level executives from the public and private sectors participated. Several FHWA division administrators, division environmental staff, and senior officials from FHWA headquarters in Washington, DC, represented the Agency at the charrette.

Forum

The initial organizing efforts culminated in hosting a Green Highways Forum, held November 8–10, 2005, in College Park, MD. The forum brought together, for the first time, several hundred practitioners including Federal, State, and local transportation and environmental officials, as well as professionals from the private sector and trade associations. The forum provided an opportunity to forecast business trends, debate key policy issues, and hear directly from top policymakers concerning the future of the Green Highways Partnership and the roles of its diverse stakeholders.

Retreat

As a follow-up to the forum, more than 40 representatives from the public and private sectors attended a retreat in St. Michaels, MD, in March 2006. The purpose was to frame the future of Green Highways and to refine the roadmap for the partnership. The meeting brought together the Green Highways leadership with additional invitees from transportation and resource agencies, business and industry, and nonprofits. The retreat focused on next steps that need to be taken to advance the partnership.

The group subdivided itself into three theme-focused teams to translate the Green Highways vision into pilot projects with measurable outcomes. Attendees identified the following three focus areas that offer the greatest potential to demonstrate Green Highways concepts:

• Watershed-driven stormwater management (planning, design, structural products, and practices)

• Recycling and reuse (industrial byproducts and recycled material uses and implementation)

• Conservation and ecosystem management (principles and practices)

Resources

The Green Highways Partnership website at http://www.greenhighways.org/ is a clearinghouse of information regarding green highway design and construction, the partnership itself, and the integrative planning method. Additionally, the website include and Green Highways Podcast that features interviews with key partnership figures and provides insight into the intersections of transportation and environmental sustainability.

1. http://www.greenhighways.org/index.cfm

2. http://www.greenhighways.org/index.cfm

3. http://www.greenhighways.org/Planning_Design.cfm

4. http://www.greenhighways.org/faq.cfm

5. http://www.greenhighways.org/Makes_Highway_Green.cfm

6. http://www.greenhighways.org/practices.cfm

7. http://www.epa.gov/owm/mtb/biortn.pdf

8. http://www.stormwatercenter.net/

9. http://www.greenhighways.org/Template.cfm?FrontID=5105

10. http://www.chesapeakebay.net/forestbuff.htm

11. http://www.epa.gov/owow/wetlands/restore/finalinfo.html; http://www.epa.gov/owow/wetlands/restore/finalinfo.html

12. http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/technical/stream_restoration/newgra.html