Long-term scenarios for mobility within cities usually neglect the energy supply challenge and how the implied risks affect urban mobility services. High levels of private transport and fossil fuel dependency tend to prevail in urban agglomerations of modern cities in many parts of the world. The resilience approach supports a new perspective on transportation solutions, not only based on how to consume less energy or emit less CO2, but how vulnerable urban mobility is in face of a fossil threat. This paper aims to assess the vulnerability of urban mobility in the face of fossil fuel threats under a social and geographical scope. We apply a case study with the city of Rio de Janeiro, confronting city inhabitants with a price increase of gasoline and oil-based public transportation. We found that more than 50% of the districts of Rio de Janeiro presents low-medium or low level of resilience of urban mobility. Furthermore, they are in areas with lower accessibility to metro stations and more citizens with reduced income levels.

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Resilience is the ability of a system to adapt, persist, and transform as a reaction to threats, which may be external or internal to the system, while vulnerability is the state of being susceptible to harm from exposure to stresses associated with environmental and social change and from the inability to adapt. Based on a study of the threats that can affect urban mobility, we identified a gap regarding the analysis of the levels of resilience and vulnerability in the face of subsidy threats that can severely affect developing countries. This article measures the level of resilience and vulnerability due to the absence of public transport fare subsidies. For this purpose, we developed an approach based on fuzzy logic and applied it in 33 administrative regions (ARs) of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We obtained four matrices of the levels of vulnerability and resilience of each of the regions as an origin and destination. The results show that areas nearest to the downtown region and those with high-capacity transportation available (commuter train and/or subway, systems with many transfer points) are more resilient, while a high level of vulnerability is associated with low income, negative socioeconomic indicators, and the predominance of road transportation to reach jobs. The contribution of this paper is the method applied to analyse the levels of vulnerability and resilience of public transport, which includes a threat that can cause a rupture that impacts routines and job accessibility in a region.

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