Resilient Transportation Analysis in the Rio Grande Valley

To express how these resilience and sustainability analyses were performed for a Metropolitan Planning Area as well as an overview of lessons learned through the process and recommendations that were developed with stakeholder feedback.

Because regions around the world are faced with increasing risk due to both extreme weather events and long-term stressors, the need for intentional investment in our infrastructure is greater than ever. As part of an effort to integrate resilience and sustainability into project prioritization, the Rio Grande Valley Metropolitan Planning Organization analyzed the region’s multimodal transportation system infrastructure to identify how planning and policy driven mechanisms affect the resilience of a community. Further, the team investigated how this regional resilience is impacted by transportation infrastructure. The study process included review of existing plans, a comprehensive risk analysis, a  multimodal needs analysis of the relationships between causes of duress (both acute and chronic), and the ability to withstand and overcome these stressors which can include floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, as well as congestion, crash rates, environmental factors (soil conditions, heat, rain), and deferred maintenance. This approach will provide the MPO with both a vulnerability assessment and recommended strategies, such as infrastructure hardening, green infrastructure, and land use policy that can be integrated into performance-based planning and project prioritization. 

This presentation will outline the methodology used to develop a scalable framework within the MPO project development process that leverages existing processes to analyze resilience. The presentation will also include a description of the tools and resources used to implement this framework and develop new strategies. The development of demographic scenarios, travel forecasts and level-of-service analysis, system reliability, asset management, environmental justice analysis and project evaluation and prioritization through the lens of resilience are discussed as tools to better understand and address resilience at a comprehensive regional level. 

The resilience of a region within this context is dependent on the diversity (or redundancy) of transportation  assets that support resistance to stressor-induced failure. Mechanisms affecting resilience at the regional level are multivariate and the depth, scale, and level of detail of the analysis pursued can be scaled. This resilience analysis, which spans beyond just roadway infrastructure, provides midsized MPO regions with a framework and tools to develop a more resilient community and a reliable transportation system to support it.