Measuring Transportation Infrastructure Resilience: Case Study with Amtrak

Abstract

This paper describes a case study performed with the US passenger rail service provider Amtrak that developed a metrics framework to measure resilience to climate risk within their Northeast Corridor operations systems and to track changes in resilience over time. Amtrak representatives reviewed metrics and selected those most relevant and also most feasible to measure and implement at Amtrak. Twenty-one metrics, termed resilience activities, focused on technical and organizational (leadership and readiness) resilience; key outcomes to measure following a disruption were identified as cost, safety, customer satisfaction, organizational development, and on-time performance. Resilience activities were scored to serve as a baseline for assessing resilience in the future. While many researchers have generated frameworks or resilience metrics, few published examples of metrics implementation in infrastructure systems are available. Amtrak appears to be progressive in their use of resilience metrics and participated in this process to improve resilience awareness within their organization and identify areas for improvement. Analysis of baseline scoring of resilience activities indicates that Amtrak assesses itself as being relatively more resilient toward climate change risk from an organizational readiness capacity than from an organizational leadership capacity or a technical capacity. Future research may include the tracking of metrics following a disruption and a periodic reassessment of resilience activity scores.