Life-Cycle-Cost Analysis of using Low Impact Development Compared to Traditional Drainage Systems in Arizona: Using Value Engineering to Mitigate Urban Runoff

The rate of urbanization has been impacted by global economic growth. A strong economy results in more people moving to already crowded urban centers to take advantage of increased employment opportunities often resulting in sprawling of the urban area. More natural land resources are being exploited to accommodate these anthropogenic activities. Subsequently, numerous natural land resources such as green areas or porous soil, which are less flood-prone and more permeable are being converted into buildings, parking lots, roads and underground utilities that are less permeable to stormwater runoff from rain events. With the diminishing of the natural landscape that can drain stormwater during a rainfall event, urban underground drainage systems are being designed and built to tackle the excess runoff resulting from urbanization. However, the construction of a drainage system is expensive and usually involves massive land excavations and tremendous environmental disturbances. The option for constructing an underground drainage system is even more difficult in dense urban environments due to the complicated underground environments, creating a need for low footprint solutions. This need has led to emerging opportunities for low impact development (LID) methods or green infrastructures, which are viewed as an environmentally friendly alternative for dealing with stormwater runoff. LID mimics the pre-development environment to retain the stormwater runoff through infiltration, retention, detention and evaporation. Despite a significant amount of prior research having been conducted to analyze the performance of runoff volume reduction and peak flow decrement of various green infrastructures, little is known about the economic benefits of using LID practices.

This dissertation fills the gap in the knowledge regarding the life-cycle-cost effectiveness of green infrastructure in current urban developments. This study’s two research objectives are:

(1) Develop a life cycle cost calculation template to analyze the cost benefits of using LID compared to the traditional drainage system

(2) Quantify the cost benefits based on the real-world construction projects

A thorough literature review led to the data collection of the hydrological benefits of using LIDs in conjunction with overviewing three real-world construction projects to quantify the cost benefits of LIDs.