Planning for Systems Management & Operations as part of Climate Change Adaptation
4. Agency Considerations for Assessing Vulnerability of Transportation Systems and Making O&M Climate-Resilient
Sections 2 and 3 illustrated the climate change effects and the potential impacts on operating agencies. While adaptation to climate change will involve the entire transportation industry and stakeholders, ultimately many of the changes that will occur will manifest themselves as challenges to personal and freight mobility and safety. However, the nature of these changes will vary based on the region and the agency. While many questions remain, agencies with operational responsibility need to assess vulnerabilities for their regions and develop new capabilities and processes to adapt to climate change. Primarily, agencies need to increase levels of capability for dealing with climate events and plan for emerging changes due to long-term climate trends. Each of these is discussed in more detail.
4.1 Increasing capability to manage more frequent and more severe climate events
As section 2.2 describes, climate change will manifest itself in a potential increase in the number and nature of severe weather events. Established approaches and practices provide the tactics to ensure a reasonable level of service to the travelers. However, there is a limit to the effectiveness of these tactics based on the type and intensity of the weather events. For more large-scale but rare events, the volumes and the geographical and temporal scales of the operational responses overwhelm the traditional tactics used for routine events. In these situations, there are short-term behavioral changes by travelers (people reacting to mandatory hurricane evacuations, trying new roads, for example) and multiple points of system failures. During these events, agencies try to ensure that their systems absorb the shocks in a resilient manner without complete failure. With the potential of more frequent and more severe events in locations, requires an agile approach to operations. Characteristics in an agency for agile emergency transportation operations may include:
Increased and flexible monitoring systems – Most operations adaptation actions rely on improved situational awareness at an operating agency for improved monitoring of flash floods, bridge scour, road weather conditions, landslides, etc. Traditionally, fixed detection infrastructure has been the dominant approach to collect situational data. The challenge posed by climate change is that potentially, a greater and different set of locations will need to be monitored over time. While monitoring using fixed infrastructure will continue to play an important role, it is unlikely that an agency can greatly increase the coverage of such sensors. Mobile observations promise to fill that coverage gap for operating agencies, from agency fleet vehicles (such as maintenance trucks) or from private sector data. Another source is crowd-sourced data directly from the traveling public. Emerging approaches using social media during disaster and even routine weather events promise to greatly increase the coverage and situational awareness of the operating agency.
Integration of sophisticated weather information at transportation operations centers – Better decision-making during weather events requires not only understanding of the current conditions but also the forecast conditions. Precipitation start times, intensity, and types are important determinants in the tactics used for responses. Sophisticated weather forecasting models are constantly being refined to provide transportation-specific forecasts including road weather conditions at the right times and geographic scales. However, integration of such data in TMC is both hampered by the lack of awareness of the existence of such tools, and the difficulty in interpreting the forecasts to make operational decisions.
Greater intra and inter-agency cooperation – Transportation operations in recent years is truly a collaborative activity involving multiple agencies and jurisdictions. Larger events today involve activation of multi-agency emergency operations centers (EOCs). Current levels of capabilities must continue to grow to deal with the anticipated impacts.
Rapid mobilization and deployment teams – One of the biggest challenges to operations is the multiple points of system failures that exist during weather events. Especially for flash flooding and other impacts with very short lead times, the ability to rapidly deploy operational personnel for site management, maintenance, debris removal, and other recovery efforts are critical.
Flexible resource allocations – Greater variability in the type, nature and intensity of events also poses a unique challenge to budget resources. While this is easier said than done in an agency framework, static or silo-ed resource allocation approaches for operations might be over-funded in one year and under in others. Different needs between winter seasons might change the mix of how resources are allocated between jurisdictions.
Cross-training of staff – Since a greater number of events are expected and it is unlikely that staffing levels are going to increase at agencies, cross-training of transportation agency staff in emergency transportation operations becomes critical.
Training for unusual events – While still related to training, climate change is going to force agencies to respond to conditions that either occur very rarely or have never occurred in their regions. Training programs for emergency transportation operations need to focus on what would be considered unusual events in regions.
4.2 Planning for Operations in an uncertain future
The major challenge to agencies is how to plan for operations an uncertain future in a fiscally responsible manner. The relationship between the probability of an impact and the severity of impact versus the cost of investment continues be a difficult equation for agencies to solve. Given the latency from planning to implementation inherent in transportation operations (i.e., future operations are dependent on plans being considered today), there is an urgency to include climate change considerations in transportation plans today. System Operations historically has been a reactive industry. Often, a disaster provides the impetus for various operational capability improvements in a region. However, with diminishing fiscal constraints and a higher expectation from the traveling public, agencies no longer can afford to be reactive, and they need to assess actively how their systems are vulnerable to climate change.
Recent guidance and best practices are starting to emerge for planning for operations with an emphasis on system performance and driven by regional objectives. Driven by policy objectives such as congestion, safety, economic competitiveness, agencies are starting to better integrate operations into the planning process. Into this paradigm of objective-driven performance-based planning, climate change considerations have to be included. While many questions remain, two main actions are worth investigation as part of planning for operations efforts
Introducing risk assessment in transportation operations planning – Risks are an inherent part of transportation planning. However, assessing the risk posed by climate change to operations is new to the field. Climate change risks vary across regions and times, they vary in scale of impacts, and there is inherent natural and modeling uncertainty in future climate scenarios. The assessment approaches may vary from qualitative assessments to quantitative but primarily needs to answer questions regarding levels of likelihood and levels of consequence of the event. Good examples for such risk assessments in transportation that might translate to this field may be found in States with high seismic activity such as California and Washington.
Integration with other adaptation efforts – An immediate approach for operating agencies is to be part of statewide climate change action plans and adaptation efforts. Integration of operations considerations such as evacuation procedures, alternate routings, monitoring systems all are worthwhile considerations as part of the larger State climate change action plans.
