A new public infrastructure project uses what intangible tool to reduce carbon emissions?

As the nation's roads degrade, the efficiency of the vehicles traveling above them degrades too, leading to increased carbon emissions. But one possible mitigating solution, according to MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub researchers who studied 5,000 miles of Virginia's interstate system, could be data-driven decision-making.

The researchers outlined the possible solution in their new research paper published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

"We found that the maintenance of just a few lane miles allows for significant performance improvement, along with lowered environmental impact, across the entire network," explained Arghavan Louhghalam, the paper's lead author. "Maintaining just 1.5 percent of the roadway network would lead to a reduction of 10 percent in greenhouse gas emissions statewide."

Researchers compared their methods against others, including a random maintenance schedule, a traffic-volume-based schedule and today's current practice of selecting roads based on their International Roughness Index value. Searching specifically for the areas where maintenance would have the greatest impact proved most beneficial.