Road infrastructure serves as a foundational driver of a nation’s economic and cultural growth. Incorporating life cycle cost analysis (LCCA), as well as considerations of availability and environmental impact, enables policymakers to make strategic decisions that not only enhance fiscal efficiency but also support sustainable progress. This paper centers on an in-depth examination of two prevalent pavement technologies: continuously reinforced concrete pavements (CRCP) and jointed plain concrete pavements (JPCP). It specifically delineates the application of these methods to a hypothetical one-kilometer motorway construction in Germany. Employing LCCA for concrete pavements, the paper evaluates long-term fiscal prudence among alternative investment opportunities, factoring in resource utilization—both materials and machinery—and long-term care and upkeep obligations over the pavements’ operational lifespans. The analysis extends to appraise agency expenditures associated with the pair of pavement strategies and estimates the concomitant delay durations and costs relevant to the exemplar project. Central to this research is the investigation of road availability and its quantifiable influence on traffic efficacy, parsing through metrics such as the tally of days roads are out of service and the subsequent repercussions on vehicular flow. The investigation also proposes strategies for the reduction of embodied carbon in CRCP and JPCP systems. While accounting for variances in functional performance and vehicular comfort levels, this study contributes scientifically by tackling pragmatic engineering dilemmas involved in pavement selection, with a spotlight on minimizing costs, curtailing traffic interruptions, and mitigating ecological impacts for the duration of the pavement’s life cycle.

As well known, the transportation industry and its related infrastructure including railway and roads, require very high construction costs. In addition, the excessive use of natural resources and energy for related construction and maintenance has highlighted the need for adapting purposeful planning with regards to sustainability related impacts. In transportation infrastructure, the focus should be to minimize energy consumption, related Greenhouse Gas emissions and other environmental impacts over their entire life cycle. In this study, a new design of substructure with a layer of recycled Polypropylene (PP) is presented and compared with scenarios using virgin PP and conventional ballast. A model was developed that can adequately evaluate the resource use and environmental effects of various use scenarios of Geosynthetic (recycled Polypropylene) materials in rail construction layers in comparison to primary raw material. The model takes into consideration technical properties investigated through finite element simulations to decouple increase technical performance from environmental impacts. The outcome of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) indicates that the recycled PP scenario causes the lowest environmental impact for a service life of 100 years. On the other hand, the Finite Element (FE) results showed that using reinforced geosynthetics between ballasted layer has better mechanical performance than the conventional ballast track railway.