The underestimated role of the transportation network: Improving disaster & community resilience

Abstract

Improving community resilience relies on our ability to evaluate and understand the direct and indirect role of the transportation network. This requires losing our fixation with network functionality in favour of an approach that evaluates whether the network is truly serving the community’s needs. In this paper, we present such an approach. With the understanding that sufficient and equitable access to amenities is key to community resilience, we leverage open-source data and routing algorithms to simulate road and service closures under various hazard scenarios. Among our methodological contributions is the ability to efficiently modify entire transportation networks to reflect hazard damage and identify isolated communities. This makes integrating hazard simulation with access and equity evaluations practicable on a large scale. We illustrate this approach in three cities. Ultimately, a broader view of the transportation network’s role will better support communities in preparing for and responding equitably when a disaster occurs.