Interstate spending, condition & emissions
A national model linking U.S. Interstate spending to pavement condition and global warming potential.
How does spending more on highways change both their condition and their carbon footprint?
With Paula Cid Ornelas and Omar Swei, I wrote the foundational Python code for a national model that links U.S. Interstate spending to pavement condition and global warming potential (GWP). It combines an autoregressive distributed lag model with probabilistic and economic input–output life-cycle assessment.
The key finding is that higher spending improves condition but raises emissions, because the embodied impacts of construction outweigh the savings in the use stage.
Paper: Cid Ornelas, P., del Campo Yañez, J. M., & Swei, O. (2026). The effects of U.S. Interstate spending on pavement condition and the environment. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 40, 102258. doi:10.1016/j.trip.2026.102258