Whether communities are large or small, urban or rural, the American public depends on public transportation to access jobs, schools, healthcare, and other critical services. Weather events and natural hazards are threatening public transit agencies and the transit systems they manage at increased frequencies and intensities. Since 2012, FTA has provided $11 billion in emergency relief funding to transit agencies to assist with recovery from—and enhance resilience to—natural disasters, emergencies, or significant events that disrupt transit services.¹

Efforts to make transit systems more resilient to the impacts of current and future natural hazards are imperative to ensuring transit fulfills the critical role it plays across American communities. By proactively embedding resilience into all aspects of decision-making, transit agencies can increase rider safety and day-to-day reliability in an increasingly unpredictable climate, ensure services continue during emergency situations, and save money on maintenance, repair, and disaster recovery activities.   

U.S. DOT Volpe Center transportation planning and policy professionals, in collaboration with the FTA Office of Environmental Policy and Programs, led the development of the Transit Resilience Guidebook, published in May 2024.  

A literature review helped the team understand the current state of resilience planning in the transit industry; interviews conducted with transit agencies yielded examples of how transit agencies from across the country are addressing resilience in practice. The U.S DOT Volpe Center team conducted interviews with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New Jersey Transit, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, among others. The U.S. DOT Volpe Center team drew upon its expertise in resilience planning and the information gathered in the literature and interviews to develop the Transit Resilience Guidebook. 

The Guidebook presents recommendations and examples on how to identify and address vulnerabilities and build resilience to current and future extreme weather events, natural disasters, and climate change impacts while ensuring priority is given to protecting vulnerable populations.  

It presents resilience planning as an iterative process to identify and address weather events, natural hazards, and risks that threaten an agency. It acknowledges that resilience cannot be achieved through the actions of any one department within a transit agency. Instead, resilience efforts must be considered and implemented, as appropriate, throughout an agency’s decision-making and project lifecycle processes.  

The Guidebook offers a phased approach to building resilience throughout a transit project’s lifecycle. 

Phase 1: Assess provides an overview of the steps involved in recognizing vulnerabilities and the climate risks they pose. This section of the Guidebook identifies the relevant transit assets and common natural hazards to consider, as well as industry-standard data sources and tools to understand and assess changing climate conditions. It also showcases example approaches that transit agencies have taken to better understand which of their assets were most vulnerable to current and future extreme weather events, natural disasters, and climate stressors. Lastly, this phase provides an overview on how to incorporate assessment results into decision-making, and it introduces four categories of resilience strategies: avoid, maintain and manage, strengthen and protect, and enhance redundancy. 

Phase 2: Plan outlines opportunities to incorporate resilience into agency planning efforts, including emergency preparedness and recovery efforts, to align planning priorities and ensure actions at the various levels of transit planning and project selection increase resilience.  

Phase 3: Design & Construct provides recommendations on how to consider potential hazards as part of the design and development of new capital projects, as well as smaller retrofits, and how to evaluate potential adaptation measures that would reduce possible damage to the newly constructed assets.   

Phase 4: Manage outlines best practices for integrating resilience into transit asset management to reduce costly damage, prevent service disruptions, and extend the assets’ useful lives for a more resilient transit system.   

Phase 5: Maintain presents opportunities to integrate resilience considerations into operations and maintenance activities to enhance an agency’s ability to prepare for and respond to weather events and natural hazards.  

Phase 6: Monitor provides information on the importance of and how to establish a monitoring and evaluation approach to track progress toward resilience goals and to assess the impact of resilient strategies.   

The Guidebook recommends climate data sources and community vulnerability screening tools that can be used to inform a vulnerability assessment. It also provides references to detailed primers and step-by-step guidance on conducting a vulnerability assessment, and information on available training and potential funding sources for supporting resilience planning and project implementation.  

About the U.S. DOT Volpe Center 

Celebrating more than 50 years of federal service to the nation, the U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s mission is to transform transportation for all. 

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Footnotes

1 This figure does not include funding associated with preventing, preparing for, or responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.