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Shipping Resilience: Strategic Planning for Coastal Community Resilience to Marine Transportation Risk (SIREN)

Many coastal communities across Canada are highly dependent upon maritime transportation systems that are vulnerable in natural disasters. This project aims to improve understanding of how coastal maritime transportation systems would be disrupted in natural hazard events, how such disruption would impact coastal communities, and what strategies could effectively address this risk.

Ports across Canada are vulnerable in natural disasters, and their disruption can pose severe consequences for marine transportation systems and the coastal communities that rely on them. This project aims to improve understanding of how different types of ports may be affected in hazard events, with focus on catastrophic earthquake risk in coastal British Columbia, and consideration of severe hurricane damage to ports in Eastern Canada.

Focusing on the movement of people and goods in the emergency response phase of a disaster, the research team develops new tools, information, and risk assessments to support preparedness planning by local and provincial governments and the transportation sector. Through iterative engagement with stakeholders, the research is also intended to foster dialogue and shared understandings of risk that are necessary for resilience planning.

The research consists of an interrelated set of activities:

  • Organization of workshops for engaging government and transport sector stakeholders.
  • Development of a framework for assessing community resilience to shipping and port disruption.
  • Development of a model and simulation tool for the coastal maritime transportation system and regional multimodal logistics system.
  • Development of a simulation model for port operations and vulnerabilities to natural hazards.
  • Development of an approach for evaluating the effectiveness of the modelling approach.

Research questions:

  1. How would a major disaster likely affect marine transportation routes?
  2. How would this marine transportation disruption affect the movement of people and resources in the emergency response phase?
  3. What strategies (e.g., alternate routes and/or transport modes) would be effective for different types of communities in alleviating the potential consequences?
  4. Will a port be available, and in what state, after a natural hazard event, considering its own vulnerability and the vulnerability of interdependent infrastructure (e.g., road access, electric power)?
  5. Based on expected states, what ports could be used for ingress and egress of populations and resources during the immediate and sustained response phases of a catastrophic disaster?
  6. What strategies would be effective for different types of ports to reduce failure risk or improve functional resilience?
Technical Report

Multimodal Freight Project Prioritization

 
Download PDF  (8.10 MB)
Publication: Oregon Department of Transportation, Research Section
Volume: FHWA-OR-RD-14-11
Publication Date: 2014
Summary:

As available data has increased and as the national transportation funding bills have moved toward objective evaluation, departments of transportation (DOTs) throughout the country have begun to develop tools to measure the impacts of different projects. Increasingly, DOTs recognize the freight transportation system is necessarily multimodal. However, few DOTs have clearly stated objective tools to make multimodal freight project comparisons. This report informs that gap by summarizing the existing academic literature on the state of the science for freight project impact estimation and reviewing methods currently used by select DOTs nationwide. These methods are analyzed to identify common themes and determine potential avenues for multimodal project evaluation. Most methods either take the form of benefit-cost analysis or a scorecard approach. Examples of each were reviewed in-depth and patterns evaluated. While most tools use similar measures, the supporting metrics vary widely and are not applicable to all modes.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Erica Wygonik, B. Starr McMullen, Daniel Holder
Recommended Citation:
Goodchild, Anne, Erica Wygonik, B. Starr McMullen, and Daniel Holder. Multimodal freight project prioritization. No. FHWA-OR-RD-14-11. Oregon Dept. of Transportation, Research Section, 2014. 
Paper

Current State of Estimation of Multimodal Freight Project Impacts

 
Download PDF  (0.50 MB)
Publication: Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
Volume: 2410
Pages: 141-149
Publication Date: 2014
Summary:

As available data have increased and as the national transportation funding bills have moved toward objective evaluation, departments of transportation (DOTs) throughout the United States have begun to develop tools to attempt to measure the effects of different projects. Increasingly, DOTs recognize that the freight transportation system is necessarily multimodal. However, no DOTs have clearly stated objective tools with which to evaluate multimodal freight project comparisons.

This paper fills that gap by summarizing the existing academic literature on the state of the science for the estimation of freight project impacts and by reviewing methods currently used by selected DOTs nationwide. These methods are analyzed to identify common themes to determine potential avenues for multimodal project evaluation.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Erica Wygonik, Daniel Holder, B. McMullen
Recommended Citation:
Wygonik, Erica, Daniel Holder, B. Starr McMullen, and Anne Goodchild. "Current State of Estimation of Multimodal Freight Project Impacts." Transportation Research Record 2410, no. 1 (2014): 141-149.