The social dimension of bridge sustainability assessment - Impacts on users and the public

In the past, bridge design usually concentrated on structural aspects. The cultural significance of a bridge as well as the interaction with the surrounding environment were frequently neglected. Within the scope of a growing demand for a holistic assessment of building activities, many evaluation criteria going beyond the pure manufacturing cost come to the fore. They are, however, not completely developed for infra-structure buildings. While methods like life-cycle costing and life-cycle assessment are already applied for in-frastructures, especially in the field of social assessment a lot of inaccuracies, assessment problems and me-thodological difficulties exist. This article summarizes different existing assessment approaches and tries to classify them. Furthermore, a method to quantify the impacts on users and the public by calculating the ma-croeconomic damage is proposed. Current developments of international standardization are incorporated in the considerations.