Sustainability and integration for environmental control of linear transportation infrastructures : the Italian case

Nowadays, the planning of road infrastructures that will pass across the territory is certainly no easy task. This is because of the obvious dichotomy between the requirements for development and the need to protect our environmental heritage. The apparently hyperstatic condition of the road design sector arises from the necessity to pursue so many different objectives (safety, quality, efficiency and efficacy), all of which are subject to a rapidly escalating complexity of constraints. The expansion to the east of the European Union area of influence and the foreseeable logistic facilities due to the opening of frontiers between the countries involved are reflected, at this moment in time, in the dire need to update and develop transport networks at a European level. Even more so in Italy, which is at a crossroads for the principal commercial and tourist routes of international importance. The “infrastructure question”, regulated by Law no. 443/2001, is an extremely topical subject, both for its technical-economic (this is the most relevant element) and the more strictly environmental connotations. Currently however, following an opposite trend to that registered in the recent past, the item of environmental impact connected to transportation systems represents a reality that is inescapable if it does not actually condition the territorial and transport policies in Italy. In parallel, the new laws on environmental subjects all converge towards bringing the evaluations of “impact” forward to the early stages of planning and designing new roads (SEA, EIA on the preliminary project, etc.), thus necessarily raising the level of the importance of the territorial system involved and, consequently, the technical level required for new infrastructures. Last, but not least, the 2002/49/EC directive, on the subject of noise pollution, stresses the need to pay increasing attention to the question of “environmental noise”, especially that due to transport infrastructures. All of this means that an integrated approach must be used for the planning of transportation systems, matching the technical-constructional requirements to those of environmental protection in order to raise the eco-sustainable nature of the latest generation infrastructures. This work does not aim to provide “the” answer to the question but rather to stress the importance of identifying the design alternatives at a preliminary stage, which take the items of environmental impact into account and can combine, as far as possible, technical efficiency with the economic and environmental sustainability of the project.