Towards resilient transportation systems for effective cyclone management—city of Visakhapatnam

Abstract

Climate change and sea level rise, have been a constant phenomenon affecting millions of people through cyclones and sudden flooding effects the performance of the infrastructure systems. The mobility plays a very crucial role in infrastructure systems, for the prosperity, growth and the movement of communities at all levels. At the local and regional levels, transportation serves a very large crowd working effectively and performing diverse activities all at the same time, which makes people vulnerable to any kind of disruptions. This highlights the requirement of robust transportation systems to, absorb effects from disturbances that are caused due to several reasons and ensure operational continuity. Visakhapatnam, has been a victim of major cyclones over the years. Approximately 448 km of road has been disrupted with a loss of Rs. 1,111 Crore. Since the occurrence of HUD HUD, “Planning for resilience” has been initiated by the governmental agencies and in this context, Visakhapatnam has been cited as one of the first cities undergoing major structural changes for the same. In this regard, this paper would focus mainly on measuring the resilience of the transportation systems by evolving a context specific framework measuring across the four major dimensions of resilience—Robustness, Redundancy, Resourcefulness and Rapidity.