Integrating Cultural, Natural, and Visual Resources into Transportation

Washington, DC (January 2013) — What if a road could be more than just something you drive on? With a little creativity, sensitivity, passion, and technological know-how, roads can be more than we’ve made of them in the past fifty years, as James L. Sipes and Matthew L. Sipes explain in their new book Creating Green Roadways: Integrating Cultural, Natural, and Visual Resources in Transportation. They assert that a great road can both be an integral part of a transportation plan and add value to a community’s quality of life by protecting natural and human-made resources, preserving habitats and lifestyles, and maximizing safety and efficiency.

In Creating Green Roadways, Sipes and Sipes confront the reality that the U.S. is an automobile-oriented society, and argue that roads must be integrated into sustainability planning. With more than thirty percent of America’s major roads currently in poor or mediocre condition, and more than a quarter of the nation’s bridges structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, we have an unprecedented opportunity for redesigning roads that complement the ecology, landscapes, and urban environments around them. Creating Green Roadways is a call to rethink the status quo—from materials used, to planning collaboratively, to landscaping with native plants.

Creating Green Roadways begins by providing the context practitioners need: Sipes and Sipes examine existing transportation policies and the impact they have upon how stakeholders make decisions, as well as the basic elements that typically make up a transportation project.

The authors then introduce their integrated and holistic approach to making our road systems work—planning for green roadways and changing the emphasis of transportation. Sipes and Sipes advocate for fixing what we have, creating walkable communities, and increasing alternative transportation to reduce traffic congestion, and they demonstrate how we can make sure that new roads are environmentally friendly, safe, efficient, cost-effective, and durable.

With the inclusion of case studies and photographs, this thorough and thought-provoking book highlights projects around the world that exemplify this holistic transportation approach. By integrating natural, cultural, and visual resources into road design and planning, Creating Green Roadways demonstrates how we can create a transportation infrastructure that improves quality of life for generations to come.

James L. Sipes is a landscape architect, environmental planner, and the author of Digital Land and Sustainable Solutions for Water Resources. Matthew L. Sipes is a civil engineer with HMB Professional Engineers, Inc.