The transportation resilience challenge

Transportation is the backbone of the modern economy and society. The importance of transportation is reflected in the sheer scale of investment that the global economy dedicates to building transportation infrastructure, which the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has estimated at approximately $2.7 trillion per year between 2016 and 2030. At its most basic level, transportation is the infrastructure and assets that cities provide to allow people to get to their jobs, to school, receive healthcare, and have access to social, political, and religious activities; and for goods to move from place to place as they are designed, components are assembled, delivered to a customer, and finally deposited for disposal. In other words, transportation enables mobility, via different modes of mobility – and the ultimate objective of mobility is not the ability to travel in itself, but accessibility, which is the ability to get to a final destination. There have been both positive and negative sides to the progress made in transportation. While motorized modes of transportation have played a key role allowing cities to become industrialized, expand, and grow, and have fueled global prosperity by enabling international trade, they remain among the largest contributors to climate change, air pollution, and local health problems, and the growth of urban populations is placing serious pressure on many transportation systems. Moreover, as cities’ and regions’ transportation systems have grown, the governance and decision-making around transportation has fragmented, and for many cities there is a lack of alignment between the owners and managers of transportation infrastructure and those who make budgetary and policy decisions. 100RC believes that cities and their urban transportation systems could and should be better prepared to deal with the shocks and stresses of today and the future in order to provide their citizens, in particular the most vulnerable, and future generations with a high quality of life. 100RC posits that the main challenges to cities today can be grouped into three main issues: urbanization, globalization, and climate change.

source :

https://resilientcitiesnetwork.org/downloadable_resources/UR/Resilience-Point-of-View-Transport.pdf