| Road traffic causes environmental impacts that increase with poor pavement characteristics. Nonetheless, departments of transportation rarely take into account in their decision-making process the environmental impacts occurring during the use phase of the pavement life cycle. This deficiency causes management decisions to be potentially non-optimal from society's perspective, even if they are technically efficient. To cope with this situation, departments of transportation can use traditional pavement management systems. But those systems are not suitable for the systematic integration of environmental impacts. On the other hand, different techniques and tools already exist in fields other than pavement management in order to facilitate the inclusion of environmental impacts in the decision-making process. In this context, the main objective of this thesis is to provide a state-of-the-art tool to quantify the environmental impacts of the use phase of the pavement for their integration in pavement management systems.;The analysis of a conceptual model based on the Impact Pathway Approach (IPA) shows that it is possible to quantify the environmental impacts of road traffic related to the pavement characteristics, and in turn to give an economic value to those impacts. The road characteristics, such as pavement surface type or roughness of the pavement surface, have a significant influence on the emission of environmental nuisances by road traffic . These nuisances are primarily atmospheric emissions, runoff and percolation waters, noise and vibration. The environmental impacts of these nuisances, which affect the well-being of residents, ecosystems, buildings and infrastructures and agricultural crops, induce economic costs such as health care or crop losses.;Based on this conceptual model, the Pavement Environmental Impact Model (PEIM) was developed in order to assign an economic value to environmental impacts. This economic value can then be incorporated in usual economic management tools of departments of transportation such as the life cycle cost analysis (LCCA). Taking into account the characteristics of the pavement surface (material, age, roughness, texture, and rigidity), the PEIM assesses the environmental impacts occurring during the use phase of the pavement, which are caused by road traffic. It computes the costs of the impacts of air pollution, greenhouse gases and noise on the health of residents, the condition of buildings and infrastructures, and the biodiversity. Several lessons can be drawn from the use of PEIM to assess environmental impacts in the case of an asphalt collector road section located in a densely populated urban area. First, the annual economic cost of environmental impacts related to pavement roughness is of the order of one million dollars per kilometer for the usual roughness of the pavement. Furthermore, it is shown that appropriate pavement management can substantially reduce the environmental impacts over the life cycle of the pavement. In particular, preventive maintenance strategies provide pavement management units with environmental benefits around twice as high as those obtained with corrective maintenance strategies. Over the life cycle of the pavement, these environmental benefits amount to several million dollars and exceed the expenditures required to maintain the road in good condition. Besides, although they are rarely taken into account, the impacts related to noise appear to be responsible for most of the environmental costs in a very urbanized context. On the contrary, while impacts from greenhouse gases are the most frequently taken into account, management strategies reducing greenhouse gases emissions only provide a marginal benefit.;In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates the practical feasibility of incorporating environmental impacts in pavement management systems, the usefulness of such incorporation to assess the total economic cost of management alternatives, and the need for this incorporation in order to reduce the environmental footprint of pavements and thus to ensure a sustainable development. |
