01515776

Component

Public transit agencies play an important role in the provision of safe, reliable and cost-effective transportation to the communities they serve. In light of the growing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, several public transportation agencies have begun to adapt their systems to be more resilient to the changing climate conditions. This paper applies transit asset management principles to climate change adaptation. This generally involves understanding potential impacts of the changing climate on an agency’s services and assets, and taking necessary actions to avoid, reduce or manage anticipated impacts. For transit agencies, this involves identifying vulnerable assets and their associated risks, and prioritizing improvements to develop more resilient systems, while achieving other system performance objectives. Principles from the Federal Transit Administration’s Asset Management Guide are applied to demonstrate how a public transit agency can adapt to extreme weather events or changes in climate, using the Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transit Authority (MARTA) as a case study. The paper outlines procedures for identifying the climate hazards and vulnerable assets and their associated risks in a MARTA’s service area. It identifies opportunities to integrate climate adaptation strategies in MARTA’s transit asset management system, at the enterprise and asset levels, and then link the resulting information to appropriate business units to manage risks while undertaking continual improvement and updates in the life cycle management of assets. Addressing climate change through asset management programs can help agencies achieve system resilience simultaneously with other system performance objectives such as safety, mobility and the state-of-good-repair.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP010 Transit Management and Performance.

01503729

14-3843

English

27p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Asset management; Case studies; Climate change; Climate change adaptation; Public transit; Transit operating agencies

Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority

Administration and Management; Environment; Public Transportation; I10: Economics and Administration; I15: Environment

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-3843

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 3:19PM