UTTRI associated faculty Professor Shoshanna Saxe was interviewed by Daily Commercial News by Construct Connect about findings published in “Embodied emissions in rail infrastructure: a critical literature review,” a paper she co-authored with Olubanjo Olugbenga and Nikolaos Kalyviotis in 2019.
The paper concludes that tunneling underground creates about 27 times more embodied greenhouse gases (GHG) than above-ground projects.
As the Province of Ontario is expected to issue a request for qualifications for the Ontario Line soon, Saxe recommends that the environmental impacts of the project be considered carefully.
Costing a project without considering environmental consequences is short-sighted, Saxe argued.
“We delude ourselves if we separate … financial impacts from the environmental and social costs,” she commented. “We just push those costs into other places. But we all pay for a polluted environment and a changing climate.”