An evaluation of green road incentive procurement in road construction projects by using the AHP

Road construction is an important activity which emits a huge amount of greenhouse gases. Voluntary actions to reduce the emissions from construction practices have rarely received attention from contractors because eco-construction methods tend to incur extra project costs and induce the bidders' concern to lose the bidding competitions. This study developed an incentive procurement system named Green Road Incentive Procurement (GRIP) to persuade contractors to adopt environmental-friendly construction methods. Initially, GRIP proposed six highly potential alternative construction methods of emission reduction for which bidders could choose as their preference. To ensure the acceptance and collaboration of this new GRIP, a survey study was conducted on two directly involved parties of road construction projects, contractors and public owners, which were selected as a sample group. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to evaluate an opinion by three options based on eight criteria. The results showed that both contractors and the public owners gave the highest weighted scores for the GRIP full implementation alternative. The users' readiness was an AHP criterion, which both parties were mutually concerned as the highest significance. These results confirmed that both involved parties agreed with the concept of GRIP and were pleased to cooperate with the GRIP implementation.