An assessment of green rural road criteria and elements for my green rural road index: a case study in Pengerang, Johor

Abstract

The rural road networks were built to connect the rural people to the town area or to other destination required by the local residents. Normally the rural roads will be developed to connect or increase the socio-economic opportunity in rural area. The green road is one of the key areas that can be look into to create the sustainable concept based on three key aspects namely social, environmental and economic factors. The main focus of the economy aspect is to increase the profits using more efficient resources, especially materials, improving the quality of life by meeting the national needs of social aspects and protecting the environment from the effects of CO2 emissions and efficient use of natural resources for environmental aspects. Therefore, it is important that stakeholders include sustainability criteria in their projects. The application of a sustainable concept on the road can be assessed by the green road evaluation tool. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to build tools to evaluate and declare green rural roads in Malaysia. The data for this study were gathered through group discussions with road construction experts and distributed questionnaires to identify sustainability factors. Then the data were analysed by factor analysis method using SPSS software. Based on the result, there are five main sustainable criteria: Sustainable Design and Construction, Social and Safety, Energy Efficiency, Environmental and Water Management and Materials and Technology that are included in the development of the green road qualification system. The analysis indicates that the social and safety become the prime criteria among other criteria.