One of my recent entries focused on personal movement. This time, I’d like to share information about how the Connector can provide another form of freedom: goods movement.

Our society practically dictates a high standard of living. People want the best of everything, but they also want a bargain. There are many ways companies can provide us with goods at reasonable prices—use “lean” manufacturing, reduce advertising costs, and use efficient transportation to get goods into our hands.

Goods are frequently moved using trucks and large freight haulers, as one way to meet our expectations for availability of those goods at an affordable price. Once purchased from a store, we generally transport those goods in our cars. It’s difficult to go grocery shopping and then ride a bicycle with your bags. It would be nearly impossible to buy a refrigerator and take it on a bus or light rail. There will be trips where we head to the bakery on our bike to pick up a loaf of bread or attend special events using public transit, but we still rely on our cars (and the trucks and freight haulers) to regularly move the goods we need for our daily lives.

South Sacramento County currently has no facility to efficiently move goods from manufacturing to distribution to storefront. Sure, there are existing highways, arterial roads and neighborhood roads…but that means some truck traffic is mixing with school buses and local trips on roads that weren’t meant for that level of traffic.

The Connector will provide a needed link to make goods movement more efficient and (hopefully) cost-effective. By offering another option for local car travel, it will reduce congestion on freeways and improve the efficiency of truck-based transportation. The Connector will also allow people another option when purchasing something at the outlets in Folsom and driving home to Rancho Cordova, or reduce the delivery cost of an appliance or home accessory purchased in El Dorado Hills and delivered to Elk Grove. Regional movement of goods should be improved overall, and that benefits everyone.

Most people hear “sustainable” and “roadway” and think there’s no way the two go together – how is it possible to build a sustainable roadway? Sustainable roadways are a newer concept and a developing field of engineering and construction that has resulted from a general agreement that roadways by themselves, as traffic facilitators, are greenhouse gas generators.

Now, that’s not to say that the Connector will be a roadway that does not produce greenhouse gas: that would be nearly impossible with current technologies. But there are many things we can do when designing and building the Connector to be sustainable.

We would like to build the Connector as a green transportation corridor. We do that by respecting the environment and doing what we can to be as recyclable and sustainable as possible. We may use all recycled materials; use cool pavement design (pavement that reflects heat instead of absorbing it, as most pavement does); use porous pavement that actually absorbs water and waste products from engines and filters the runoff before it enters the groundwater; set up solar stations to store power to use at night to generate the light for off-ramps, overcrossings, information signs and traffic signs; and even include “critter crossings” so we don’t impact the migration paths of animals.

We are planning to make the Connector friendly for multiple modes of transportation, from bicycling to transit to equestrian. We hope the design, when it is approved, will make people feel that including other travel options wasn’t an afterthought but was integral to the overall viability and mission of the roadway – because that is genuinely our goal. We have the opportunity, because we are looking at different modes of travel from the beginning, to have different multi-modal elements in different areas of the alignment. It doesn’t have to be “one size fits all,” but can be flexible based on what people would like to see in a certain area.

The list of sustainable elements we can use is growing, and President Obama’s desire to “go green” with infrastructure projects will no doubt lead to more research and development. I’m looking forward to helping develop new, creative approaches that will enable us to build a sustainable roadway in our region.

]]> http://connectorjpa.net/2009/04/what-is-a-sustainable-roadway/feed/ 0