Chapter 6 - Transportation resilience: International perspectives

Abstract

Based on research on recent disasters from around the world, this chapter identifies lessons and strategies for strengthening the resilience of transportation systems. It argues that transportation is essential to the resilience of other systems, which support disaster response and recovery. There are three reasons to focus on international perspectives on transportation resilience. First, in both developed and developing countries across the world, there are useful ideas, policies, and practices supporting transportation resilience. Second, a broad spatial and temporal perspective provides insight into not just different hazards and threats but also effective transportation strategies related to response, recovery, mitigation, and preparedness for disasters. Third, many threats and hazards faced by those managing transportation systems including climate change, sea-level rise, and other global problems and require plans, actions, and interventions of public and private actors at different scales including neighborhood, city, regional, national, and global. International perspectives are useful for comparative analysis and for the development of collective actions to reduce stressors and increase resilience. Urbanization, globalization, and new technologies affect not just the quality of transportation services, but also the longer term performance and resilience of these systems. There are important lessons to be distilled from international cases in terms of exposure to future threats and hazards and in understanding coping mechanisms, adaptation strategies, and transportation resilience.