Integrated infrastructure-environment design for a sustainable development of transport systems: an Italian case-study

The topic of the “environmental impact” of road infrastructures is nowadays a very actual theme, which has gained a significant importance in the present delicate emergency in the development of Italian and European transport systems. In fact, together with a growing demand for new infrastructures, strongly enhanced at a global international level, have to be mentioned the urgent and pressing transport-related problems concerning the environment’s exploitation: noise, air pollution, landscape deterioration, naturalistic interferences, visual intrusion, impoverishment of soils. The paper contains the guide-lines for a correct approach to an integrated infrastructures-environment design, and describes an application to the construction of an important motorway in Northern Italy.