The Transportation Network’s role in disaster and community resilience

When natural disasters and extreme events cause the closure or damage of transportation networks like roads and bridges, how can governments and planners ensure that communities have access to critical services and amenities crucial for their recovery, wellbeing, and cohesion, especially after disasters?

Transportation networks play a critical role in supporting and improving a community’s resilience by ensuring access to food, health, emergency services, schools, and recreational facilities. Studies have shown that people with better access to resources have higher resilience, while the opposite is true in poor communities.

A paper by M.J. Anderson, D.A.F. Kiddle, and T.M. Logan, “The underestimated role of the transportation network: Improving disaster & community resilience,” published in Transportation Research, investigated the role of the transportation network in providing adequate and equitable access to amenities and services, which is key to community resilience.

Mitchell Anderson, the study’s lead author writes:

While numerous studies have been completed to understand the reliability and resilience of transport networks, current assessments often neglect two things: the wider objective of the network (which is to allow people to travel between destinations of interest) and the variety of needs (and therefore destinations) of the people that the network serves.

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