Transportation infrastructure is vulnerable to threats such are natural and man-made hazards and each agency needs to improve their own ability to adequately and decisively respond to sudden and unforeseen challenges to infrastructure performance. It is pivotal for countries to learn from past experiences to form a shared view on possible future development of transportation networks and how to improve current management approaches to be flexible and adaptive to address future threats, which are likely to be more damaging due to climate change. However, the complexity of approaches being developed depends on the experience of the road operator with natural hazards. Usually, the trigger for improvement of current procedures is related either to a recent hazard event that had a severe impact on network users and society or to a frequently occurring event of a lesser magnitude and consequences thereof.
The report shows that road owners/operators currently apply measures that are aimed at evaluation of asset performance, infrastructure protection, preservation and recovery after failures, which is along the lines of a resilience-based framework. However, there is a need to embrace resilience as a core component of decision making. This will provide valuable insights on potential vulnerabilities in network and the capacity of infrastructure to withstand and recover from disruptions. This important information supports road agencies in prioritisation of maintenance projects fostering the long-term sustainability and adaptability of their infrastructure assets in the face of threats.
The terminology used in the report and the background on evaluation of resilience aspects: robustness, redundancy, rapidity of response and resourcefulness is discussed in the beginning, while the main body of the report is a collection of examples from practice on measures to improve resilience aspects. The approaches in practice comprise planning of preventative maintenance measures, which target reduction of threat magnitudes, mitigation of failure probability/rates of assets and further, mitigation of consequences of failure and recovery measures. The agency-wide approaches that incorporate resilience aspects in a decision-making process are discussed at the end of the report. The variety of presented examples allows that a broad audience of owners/operators of road infrastructure coming from low to high-income countries can relate to similar issues and learn from the experience of others.