CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

This research aims to serve as a key foundational step for ongoing and evolving research in transportation resilience to assess, measure, evaluate, and integrate resilience processes, and investments towards an objective performance-based planning and management approach. Products developed as part of this research provide practical, step-by-step guidance to transportation practitioners on selecting, developing, and deploying resilience performance measures to assess the impacts and performance of state DOT (and other transportation agency) resilience efforts.

As highlighted in the final chapter of NCHRP Research Report 1159, though agencies have made considerable progress on measuring resilience and drafting RPMs, the nascency of research on this topic indicates the need for additional efforts that are underway, planned, and require identification in a strategic manner. This is needed to inform transportation practitioners ways to plan, invest, and manage transportation infrastructure that continues to face disruptions of increasing frequency and magnitude, driven by extreme weather and natural hazard variability. As the industry’s experience with resilience investments and initiatives gets built over time, a community of practice approaches to sharing actual performance and monitoring data for evaluating the impacts of resilience efforts could be built and used as a shared resource. This may include the development of a pooled database (similar to the ITS Deployment Evaluation web portal for TSMO strategies) would support the development of data-sharing, advanced modeling, and long-term performance measurement. Once users are engaged and actively populate the database, practitioners can leverage the findings to evaluate the best possible resilience improvement strategies to apply to their unique contexts.

During the course of this research, researchers and practitioners involved as stakeholders provided input on topics and research where there is universal need to support and enrich this topic to support these goals and informed decision-making. Significant challenges include the concepts of uncertainty, asset performance under changing conditions, limited access to high quality data and climate models, as well as how to incorporate the needs of affected populations and community-responsive decisions into resilience planning. The Compendium of RPMs and the RPM templates provide in-depth outlines and methodologies to set up data collection, initiate assessments, lay the foundation for future assessments and incorporate community resilience, to serve as the underpinning for adoption by DOT and other transportation practitioners. As new information, modeling techniques and methods become available (e.g., NOAA Atlas 15), new tools are deployed, practitioners will be able to model and assess the impacts of resilience efforts while communicating the implications to intended audiences on potential uncertainties and externalities.

Despite the challenges, critical progress is being made through research efforts like this and others that are planned and underway. For example, this research has illuminated that resilience practitioners globally are working towards standardizing resilience performance management. Research documented in the case studies that European researchers are undertaking in this area points to the fact that there are potential approaches that can be leveraged or co-developed. This research has developed 13 RPMs as well as an implementation model in detail, covering every step a transportation practitioner would need to perform. Finally, NCHRP Research Report 1159 can be a standalone resource for those new to the practice as well as seasoned resilience practitioners to continue to build off and improve. Through these efforts, agencies can advance their efforts to effectively measure, monitor, and track progress towards more resilient transportation systems.