The concepts of vulnerability and resilience help explain why natural hazards of similar type and magnitude can have disparate impacts on varying communities. Numerous frameworks have been developed to measure these concepts, but a clear and consistent method of comparing them is lacking. Here, we develop a data-driven approach for reconciling a popular class of frameworks known as vulnerability and resilience indices. In particular, we conduct an exploratory factor analysis on a comprehensive set of variables from established indices measuring community vulnerability and resilience at the U.S. county level. The resulting factor model suggests that 50 of the 130 analyzed variables effectively load onto five dimensions: wealth, poverty, agencies per capita, elderly populations, and non-English-speaking populations. Additionally, the factor structure establishes an objective and intuitive schema for relating the constituent elements of vulnerability and resilience indices, in turn affording researchers a flexible yet robust baseline for validating and expanding upon current approaches.
Transportation modeling within the context of extreme weather events induced by climate change is critical to understand and improve the resilience of transport systems as the world moves further into the 21st century. Among transportation modes, navigable inland waterways in particular face severe challenges to their future reliability as a result of extreme weather events. The economic implications of inland waterway operational efficiencies on commercial shipping have been studied in detail for several decades. Less well understood, however, are the effects of tow operation procedures enacted during adverse river conditions that have resulted from extreme weather events. This paper describes a model of a waterway segment that simulates stakeholder decision making and tow operator behavior to provide stakeholders with insights into the possible benefits of waterway action plans as operational guidance documents. Simulations run for a test area of the navigable inland waterway system indicated that operational procedures recommended in waterway action plans might have a significant impact on waterway operational efficiencies, which suggests that the model may be a useful decision-support tool for waterway stakeholders.
This paper presents a micromobility scooter policy comparison between 10 mid-sized peer cities with respect to 12 policy dimensions. Because of the evolutionary nature of the policy, a temporal analysis of policy dimensions is required, which we conduct and present in this work. The impact of these individual policies reaches across the city itself, the operating company, and the mobility user—all of which are assessed throughout this work. Many of these policy dimensions are acute pain points for cities, such as fleet caps, permitting fees, and equity requirements. In the temporal analysis, some dimensions show not just happenstance variability in attempts to manage forms of micromobility, but appreciable trends. Approximately 1 year after the deployment of dockless electric scooters in cities throughout the United States and the world, cities have made multiple attempts at regulations and legislation to handle the new mobility mode. Throughout this time, cities have agreed from the start in some aspects of policy such as device removal, safety, speed limit, and bonds. In other dimensions, such as fleet expansion plans, equity regulations, and parking requirements, cities see directed movement over time toward a convergence point.
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