Transit Agency Adaptation to Extreme Weather Events: Cataloguing and Modeling, Costs, Decisions and Behaviors (NCTR – Climate Change Adaptation)

The project aims to develop greater detail about the decision process, costs, perceived risks and tradeoffs that transit planners and managers consider as part of addressing potentially damaging extreme weather events. The project also aims to work toward the development of decision tools and approaches that can more effectively respond to future weather related challenges that are often associated with climate change.

We plan to conduct a two-part, four-component project that collects different types of data and conducts different types of analysis related to transit adaptation to extreme weather events. Taken together the four components will provide substantial insights into the decision process – specification of costs, occurrence and severity of weather events, recognition of risks and risk perceptions, and the role that inter-organizational network structures play in information dissemination, coordination and support. The four components are:

Part I

1. Create an inventory of adaptation strategies, with a characterization of costs and benefits of each.
2. Conduct one or two case studies of transit agency decisions to reducing the impacts of extreme weather events. The case studies would not only collect cost data, but would also consider perceived benefits, perceived risks, and risk tolerances related – factors that fundamentally affect decision outcomes. In this regard, the research team will look at the FEMA reimbursement guidelines to understand the extreme weather events eligible for reimbursement (Extreme heat is not reimburseable; CTA and other agencies are affected by the FEMA guidelines).

Part II

3. Develop a dataset of forecasted climate data, history of extreme weather events data, government finance data, and other institutional data for all transit cities. The data can be used descriptively or integrated in other analyses.
4. Conduct a national survey of transit agencies to go beyond existing descriptive assessments of adaptation activity, to better explain and inform why transit agencies adopt some strategies or behaviors and others do not. This survey will pay attention to the broader interagency and inter-organizational information and resource networks within which transit agencies operate.

For more information, contact Sara Hendricks at hendricks@cutr.usf.edu.