Dec 16 2024
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The research question seeks to answer what is an effective performance measure for transportation resilience in a community, state, or other jurisdiction? Progress toward solving these questions has been underway for several years, though failing to reach the desired outcome. The need for this research was further reinforced during the December 2022 AASHTO conference in Providence and the January 2023 TRB annual meeting, which included a handful of workshops and sessions that broached this subject. From the perspective of high-quality performance management practice, effective measures of resilience have been elusive.
While the community has established measures of resilience for specific infrastructure, organizations, or supply chains, the metrics and definitions are lacking for community mobility. This research will focus on how best to measure it, from a state-of-the-art performance management perspective, not just the easy but low-value event or activity tallies. Consider an agency or community investing in preparedness work, infrastructure hardening, or implementing a policy shift – what is the most effective, objective, outcome-based evidence for whether the jurisdiction is now more resilient than it was a year ago? While there are seeds of ideas, questions linger and have been raised by multiple agencies, PIARC, AASHTO committees, TRB committees, and surely others.
While there are several published resources referring to resilience performance, there remains a gap in effective performance measurement that this proposed research seeks to close.
There are many laws, rules, references, and guidance documents going back many years, and right up to the current PROTECT Program guidance. The Further Consolidated Appropriations Act (2020), H.R.1865, calls on the “Secretary of Transportation to enter into an agreement with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to conduct a study through the Transportation Research Board on effective ways to measure the resilience of transportation systems and services to natural disasters, natural hazards, and other potential disruptions.”
Be wary of two tangents in literature: those focused solely on infrastructure and others about operational/organizational resilience, which are mostly unhelpful and distracting. Apart from published guidance, this research project will include a scan of select agencies to gather more evidence and examples, including efforts to integrate transportation resilience with broader initiatives like communication and energy infrastructure.
This research seeks to clarify and refine what it means to have an effective, outcome-based, high-level performance management approach to resilience. Toward this end there are three essential parts:
In addition to developed guidance, this project will pilot the implementation of a high-quality resilience performance measure into existing performance management frameworks for up to five agencies. Not only states, but MPOs, e.g. Los Angeles and San Diego have promising initiatives already developed.
resilience, resiliency, community resilience, performance management, measures, KPIs
This project would advance goals identified in the AASHTO Strategic Plan, most specifically the goal of “Safety, Mobility and Access for Everyone” that includes “strengthen resiliency.” This project would also support several strategies in the Strategic Plan, including establishing frameworks and tools to enable impactful policy decisions, supporting implementation within member agencies, advocating to minimize the impacts of climate change, and applying scenario planning to better weigh options in decision-making.
Transportation resilience continues to grow in importance and this gap in practice needs to be addressed. Beyond natural hazards, this work should address increasing system demand (e.g., growing or shifting populations), technology and mobility advancement risks (e.g., new or changing modes), and institutional issues such as risk appetites and scarce resources.
This is proposed as an implementation project for NCHRPs 23-26 Measuring Impacts and Performance of State DOT Resilience Efforts, planned to be completed by the end of 2024. It may also be done in parallel with the new 23-35 Developing New Performance Metrics for Risk Management.
This research would primarily be used by transportation agencies and others responsible for implementing resilience performance measures and management systems and build on some of the research conducted on other projects. Recently completed NCHRP Project 23-09 established a framework and research roadmap for assessing risk to agency assets and the traveling public from extreme weather, climate change, and other threats and hazards. Follow-on NCHRP Project 23-32 Asset Risk & Resilience will develop the technical resource in three phases, including planning, execution, and final product development. As described above, this research should be conducted along a parallel and complementary timeline. Critical implementation elements include a communication plan to ensure awareness of the research products and TRB, FHWA, and AASHTO webinars to share the findings. As this work emphasizes resilience measures that are outcome-based and trackable over time, implementing organizations that are expected to monitor performance over time may benefit from collaboration.
A subsequent phase of this research funded through NCHRP 20-44 may be helpful to disseminate the research findings more broadly and develop case studies showing the use of the research guidance. There are several other AASHTO and TRB committees interested in resiliency that would likely support this project, including:
The current draft of the problem statement is available as a word document here: https://www.tam-portal.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2024/08/Research-Needs-Statement-for-Implementing-Effective-Resilience-Performance-August-2024.docx