Incorporating public transport in a methodology for assessing resilience in urban mobility

Abstract

Resilience has gained importance in the current research and policy agendas as it incorporates concepts of adaptation and transformation. Urban areas are complex systems exposed to different shocks, which have impacts on its various components. Research in transport has already incorporated the concept of resilience with more or less sophisticated approaches that are intensive on data and technical expertise. There is a need to explore the incorporation of resilience in simpler and less data intensive methods that can be easily applied in a wider range of contexts. One of the aims of this research is to develop a method that can use commonly available mobility management tools allowing smaller urban areas to analyse and plan for resilience. We present a new development of a method to assess resilience in transport systems with a commonly used mobility management tool (the origin-destination matrix) for calculating an overall measurement of resilience. The method assumes that car trips are transferred to active modes or to the available public transport routes in the event of any disruption in the system. We consider different scenarios of availability of public transport in case of disruptive events. We applied the method to two urban areas in Brazil. The variation of the contribution of the public transport presents patterns comparable between the two cases. The spatial distribution of trips shows the relative importance of resilient trips and the cities’ spatial structure. The inclusion of public transport routes has an impact on the levels of accessibility of lower income users.