Abstract

With the impact of climate change increasing, public service infrastructure has to become more resilient against extreme weather events as well as human-made disasters. Public transit is a central part of urban infrastructure, often mainly consisting of interacting light-rail as well as express and community bus networks and connected to national rail and individual traffic systems. To increase such a system’s resilience against small disturbances and larger outages – as they might result from climate change – service providers need a toolbox of potential measures to mitigate such incidents’ impact and to re-establish services as soon as possible after an outage. This paper presents thoughts towards a bi-modal urban transit simulation system covering both light rail and (express and community) bus networks. Important aims of the system are a) to enable operators to evaluate measures against small disturbances and larger outages as they happen, and b) to evaluate what combination of disaster risk management and resilience-building strategies shows most potential to help increasing the resilience of urban transit systems against extreme weather events resulting from climate change as well as other disasters.