In Cuba the road planning and construction strategy is established by the Ministry of Transport, through the National Road Centre. The same one is based on the National Road Scheme, a document elaborated in 1980. Because in Cuba the traffic levels are very low, the roads are not perceived by the population like a nuisance source. Nevertheless, with the increasing of the environmental culture the levels of noise and atmospheric pollution and other impacts caused by an obsolete vehicular park are evaluated in a sensitive manner. For being the development of the road infrastructure so linked to the tourism development, linked to ecologically sensitive areas, there is a social and state concern to achieve the compatibility of the tourism development with the conservation and protection of the environment. Until present time the Environmental Impact Assessments have assumed the consideration of the environment in road projects. Without abandoning the continuity and improvement of this tool, we have evolved toward Road Environmental Design, incorporating the environmental issues to the process of analysis of solutions and conception of the own project and toward a change in the strategies of road planning, for which national standards and regulations have been established. An environmental strategy for the Civil Engineering Career has been also developed with the purpose that those graduates can identify the main activities of environmental incidence and to propose preventive and mitigation measures of the man-made environmental impacts. For the study of the road projects multidisciplinary teams are conformed and able to analyse, besides the technical factors of the road design, other elements like the environmental impact and protection, the balanced development of the territory and the coherence of the projects in urban areas. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135448.
Abstract