Sustainability assessment of highways: A Malmquist index of U.S. states

The United States has the world´s largest and busiest network of roads. There is a dire need to quantify sustainability for the highways of each state in the U.S. to ensure they are performing to this ability. The objective of this study is to develop an analytical tool that can be used to evaluate states holistically in terms of highway sustainability. Performance Indicators of states are used to derive the sustainability ratios and data envelopment analysis, a linear programming based mathematical approach, is used to evaluate the states with respect to highway sustainability. This approach does not require the use of a priori subjective weightings to evaluate the sustainability scores of states. Malmquist indices are calculated to identify the change in highway sustainability of these states over a period of time.