Freight Resiliency Performance Measures: Hudson-to-Beloit Corridor

People, private companies and public agencies, all face the possibility of a sudden event that disrupts their normal activities. Disasters on the transportation network, whether due to nature, human error, or human intent, raise awareness of the need for plans of action to quickly restore mobility. Resiliency of the transportation network is its capacity to absorb the impacts of a disruption and to quickly return to normal operating levels. Resiliency planning is a means to identify vulnerabilities and the necessary actions to transform a fragile system into one that provides service during small interruptions and recovers quickly from large disruptions. Resiliency measures are useful to understand recovery and may be used to guide infrastructure investments that protect against disruptions or that accelerate recovery after a disaster. This paper presents a methodology to estimate two resiliency measures, robustness and rapidity using truck location data along an interstate corridor. The data were collected and made available for this research by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), through the Freight Performance Measurement Initiative, a partnership between ATRI and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). The measures were derived from resiliency triangles of truck traffic behavior during two significant weather events in 2008 that affected the Interstate 90/94 corridor from Hudson to Beloit, Wisconsin. The paper presents a set of criteria to qualify the computed resiliency measures. The criteria reflect the observed behavior during the disruptions. The criteria and the measures together are a useful tool to evaluate resiliency.