RAND CORPORATION
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH BOARD
Summary
This report provides an approach for incorporating resilience into transportation planning and assessment for state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations. We build on the Federal Highway Administration’s Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Framework (VAF) to better incorporate principles of resilience into the decisionmaking process for long-term transportation planning. Based on stakeholder interviews and reviews of the transportation resilience and resilience metrics literature, we developed a simple conceptual framework to adapt resilience principles to transportation. The absorptive capacity, restorative capacity, equitable access, and adaptive capacity (AREA) interpretation of resilience contributes to this framework and provides a starting point for the development of a suite of metrics that can be used in planning and decisionmaking. By focusing on the criticality and exposure of various assets of the transportation network, the AREA approach provides a means to discover alternative options or strategies that should be considered when planning to increase the resilience of the entire transportation system.
Recommendations
- We make the following recommendations for implementing the VAF to incorporate more aspects of resilience:
- Expand the objectives and scope of the framework to include shocks and stresses that are not directly tied to climate change, including cyberattacks.
- Broaden the asset data to include human and equipment assets, use the logic model to guide expansions, and identify the criticality of these new assets.
- Expand hazard data to consider a wider array of hazards and determine whether they are systemwide or if they influence only a subset of assets.
- Use the indicators we identified to assess the resilience of the system in a way that acknowledges the interaction of the criticality and exposure of the assets.
- Engage stakeholders and decisionmakers to help weigh the trade-offs that come with prioritizing options.
- Use an established critique, such as multicriteria decision analysis, economic analysis, benefit-cost analysis, or life cycle cost analysis, to facilitate prioritization.
- Consider the benefits of investment in times of both normalcy and disruption.
Introduction
The Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA’s) Vulnerability Assessment and Adaptation Framework (VAF) “is a manual to help transportation agencies and their partners assess the vulnerability of transportation infrastructure and systems to extreme weather and climate effects” (Filosa et al., 2017, p. i). Although this manual helps transportation planning agencies incorporate climate adaptation into their existing processes, it lacks a framework for incorporating resilience into the transportation planning process more broadly. For this reason, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, which advises the nation on issues of transportation, tasked RAND Corporation researchers to develop an evidence-based framework for incorporating resilience into the implementation of the VAF and into transportation planning for state departments of transportation (DOTs) and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs).
The VAF provides a six-step process to frame planning around mitigating and adapting to vulnerabilities in a transportation system. These six steps are
1. articulating objectives and defining the study scope
2. obtaining asset data
3. obtaining climate data
4. assessing vulnerability
5. identifying, analyzing, and prioritizing adaptation options
6. incorporating assessment results into decisionmaking.
The focus of the VAF is on mitigating and adapting to vulnerabilities that arise because of climate change. More broadly, the VAF can be used to plan for and assess the resilience of the transportation system, not only to vulnerabilities because of climate change but also to shocks and stressors from other sources. Instead of developing a new resilience-centered planning and assessment framework, we offer a strategy focused on resilience that uses the VAF as a backdrop for implementation. Because organizations might have experience with the VAF, our approach simply incorporates resilience into a broader suite of vulnerabilities. Our implementation strategy is to view the assets in a transportation network through the absorptive capacity, restorative capacity, equitable access, and adaptive capacity (AREA) lens to allow for more strategies to increase the system’s resilience, taking into account the criticality and exposure of different network assets in the system.
One of the challenges in developing a coherent definition and conceptual framework for the transportation sector is that it is but one system in the larger socioeconomic system. Additionally, transportation is a means to an end rather than an end in itself. People use the transportation system to access economically, socially, and environmentally valuable locations. Overlaying these ideas on a more traditional characterization of resilience could contradict or miss key aspects of the value of the transportation system in times of stress or shock. Therefore, our approach for better integrating resilience into the transportation system is to recast the objectives of resilience in terms of transportation-related concepts. This recasting will allow transportation planners to incorporate resilience into long-term systemwide planning and the decisionmaking process more easily.
We make the following recommendations for implementing the VAF to incorporate more aspects of resilience:
- Expand the objectives and scope of the framework to include shocks and stresses that are not directly tied to climate change, including cyberattacks (see Table 3.1 in Chapter 3).
- Broaden the asset data to include human and equipment assets, use the logic model to guide expansions, and identify the criticality of these new assets (see Figure 3.4 in Chapter 3).
- Expand hazard data to consider a wider array of hazards, including cyberattacks, and determine whether they are systemwide or if they influence only a subset of assets (see Table 3.1 in Chapter 3).
- Use the indicators we identified to assess the resilience of the system in a way that acknowledges the interaction of the criticality and exposure of the assets (see Chapter 4).
- Engage stakeholders and decisionmakers to help weigh the trade-offs that come with prioritizing options (see Chapter 2, Appendix A, and Appendix B).
- Use an established critique, such as multicriteria decision analysis, economic analysis, benefit-cost analysis, or life cycle cost analysis, to facilitate prioritization (see Chapter 2 and Appendix B).
- Consider the benefits of investment in times of both normalcy and disruption (see Figure 3.3 in Chapter 3).
We used a two-pronged approach to develop a conceptual framework for incorporating resilience into transportation planning and implemented both prongs in parallel. The first prong consisted of interviews with stakeholders from MPOs and state DOTs to assess the state of resilience in transportation and understand how stakeholders use information on the costs and benefits of resilience when making long-term investments in highway and transportation infrastructure. The second prong consisted of a review of the literature on resilience with a focus on system-of-systems frameworks, literature on defining and incorporating resilience into transportation planning, and metrics for transportation resilience. In addition, a research team member attended the Transportation Resilience Innovations Summit and Exchange in Denver, Colorado, in 2018. The goal in attending the conference was to understand the dialogue around transportation resilience among key stakeholders, including state DOTs, MPOs, transportation consulting organizations, academics, and others who focus on resilience in transportation. This approach informed our conceptual framework and provided context for resilience that can be used to modify the implementation of the VAF. Our conceptual framework acknowledges the broad network of organizations involved in transportation planning and the role of the transportation system as one element of a broader system of systems. The transportation network includes not only infrastructure assets but also the approximately 4,200 people who work for MPOs across the United States and the 50 state DOTs (Kramer, Carroll, and Karimi, 2017). Embedding the framework in this broader system-of-systems perspective helps planners discover alternative options or strategies that should be considered during planning to increase the resilience of the transportation system.
There is neither a single theory that provides a conclusive definition of resilience nor a widely accepted practice for achieving resilience. From some perspectives, resilience is not a measurable outcome at all; rather, it is a way of approaching all aspects of a system over the course of the life cycle of a project, from planning to operation and maintenance. Presidential Policy Directive 21 provides federal perspective, defining resilience for critical infrastructure as
the ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. Resilience includes the ability to withstand and recover from deliberate attacks, accidents, or naturally occurring threats or incidents (The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 2013, p. 12).
The Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, which was signed into law in December 2015, requires planners to consider resilience and, specifically, stormwater during the planning process (Pub. L. 114-94, 2015). Although the FAST Act requires resilience to be considered, it does not provide guidance for how to incorporate resilience into the planning process. Furthermore, different communities face different shocks and stresses on their transportation infrastructure. Thus, the aim of this report is to provide guidance to transportation planners for how resilience might be incorporated into the assessment of and planning for transportation infrastructure.
Using our reviews of the literature and interviews with transportation stakeholders, we have developed a logic model for mapping the transportation system assets to activities, outputs, and outcomes, as well as to community well-being. By mapping the system, we are better able to capture how modifying the system translates into outcomes that planning organizations are trying to improve. We then combine this system mapping with a multidisciplinary view of resilience to develop a framing of resilience for that transportation system: the AREA approach to resilience. Each of the AREA dimensions of resilience suggests a means through which to increase the resilience of the system, although by different methods. Importantly, the networked nature of the transportation system means that the aim of investment in resilience is to reduce reliance on individual assets or reduce the assets’ exposure so that cascading effects across the network are mitigated. That is, resilience investments should improve the operation of the network during both normal and disrupted times and avoid cascading failures of the network when disruptions do occur.
In the next chapter, we provide an overview of how resilience has been considered in transportation specifically, drawing on our two-pronged approach, which we discuss in Appendixes A and B. In Chapter 3, we develop our logic model and conceptual framework. In Chapter 4, we summarize metrics that could be used for measuring resilience based on the AREA approach. In Chapter 5, we incorporate our conceptual framework into the implementation of the VAF. Finally, in Chapter 6, we provide some general conclusions for planners about incorporating resilience into the transportation system. As noted earlier, we provide detailed overviews of our interviews with stakeholders and the literature review of resilience in Appendixes A and B, respectively.
Download full version (PDF): Incorporating Resilience into Transportation Planning and Assessment
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About the Transportation Research Board
www.trb.org
The Transportation Research Board (TRB) provides innovative, research-based solutions to improve transportation. TRB is a program unit of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a non-profit organization that provides independent, objective, and interdisciplinary solutions.
Tags: FHWA, RAND Corporation, Resilience, Transportation Research Board, TRB
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