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Planning for Severe Weather Events in Public Transit Operations

Overview

This document is a Master’s Thesis developed for an Urban Planning and Policy program. It makes recommendations for implementing a severe weather planning process for transit agencies. To start, it reviews weather impacts on surface transportation and potential impacts of climate change. Severe weather events addressed include flooding, winter storms, ice storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes. It also reviews some general guidelines for hazard mitigation, emergency planning, and continuity of planning operations. Recommendations made are based on feedback from 12 transit agencies of various sizes, with annual ridership ranging from 108,000 to 436 million. Agency planning processes, preparedness, collaboration, internal and external communications, service changes due to weather, and weather event procedures are summarized. A flowchart on page 23 summarizes the recommended severe weather planning process. It includes conducting assessments, identifying stakeholders, defining agency roles during an emergency (what kind of service to provide), preparing a communications plan, identifying service strategies, and performing evaluations and updates.

Source Organization Location

Chicago
,
IL

Operations Area of Practice

    Transit Operations
    Interagency Agreements / Cooperation / MOUs
    Communicating Reliability Information
    Planning for Operations
    Road Weather Management
    Traffic Incident Management
    Emergency Transportation Operations

Organizational Capability Element

    Planning
    Traffic Incident Management
    Emergency Transportation Operations
    Road Weather Management
    Local government/MPO/RTPA cooperation

Content Type

Research

Role in Organization

Transportation Planner
Senior Engineer
Researcher/Academic
Principal Engineer
Manager / First Line Supervisor
Engineer
Senior Manager
Transit Professional
Associate Engineer

Publishing Organization

Universities

Document Downloads

Prime Contractor
Sarah Jane Sherburn
Issue Date