Sustainable Design Guideline Development for Infrastructure Projects

The Port Authority of NY & NJ (PANYNJ) is a bi-state agency that builds, operates, and maintains infrastructure critical to the New York/New Jersey region's trade and transportation network. These facilities include America's busiest airport system, marine terminals and ports, the PATH rail transit system, six tunnels and bridges between New York and New Jersey, the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, and the World Trade Center. For more than eight decades, the Port Authority has worked to improve the quality of life for the more than 17 million people who live and work in New York and New Jersey—a region that supports 8.6 million jobs with an estimated gross regional product of more than $929 billion dollars. Part of working to improve the quality of life for those who live, work, or visit our region is to build, operate, and maintain PANYNJ facilities in a sustainable fashion. As regional transportation agencies work towards meeting sustainability and environmental goals, the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) has become the most common sustainable design standard for facility design, construction, and operations. The LEED model functions well for building-centric projects, but transportation agencies often build, operate and maintain a variety of facility types, including roads, subways, railroads, ports, and airports. Since 2007, the PANYNJ has had Sustainable Design Guidelines with performance metrics that align with those of the LEED Green Building Rating System. These have worked well in guiding staff in new building construction and renovation projects, but they have not provided adequate sustainable design guidance to the majority of the PANYNJ's infrastructure projects. Recognizing a need for more comprehensive guidelines, the PANYNJ's Engineering Department devised additional guidelines specifically addressing sustainable design for transportation infrastructure. This paper presents an overview of the development of these guidelines, with particular emphasis on the case studies examined.