Integrated approach to the road project

Nowadays, the planning of new road infrastructures is not an easy task, because of the obvious dichotomy between the requirements for territory development and the need to protect our environmental heritage. The apparently hyperstatic condition of the road design sector comes 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 the dire need to update and develop transport networks at a European level. Even more in Italy, which is at the crossroads for the main commercial and tourist routes of international importance. In consequence of it, an integrated approach must be used for the planning of transport 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. The hope is that, in the near future, the environment can be effectively integrated into the criteria of choice and design of new infrastructures, developing the new projects on the basis of discussion and collaboration between the engineers and environmental experts. Just in this way alone the hoped-for result of sustainable development of transport infrastructures can be achieved.