Advancing transportation resilience in Ohio 

By leveraging an efficient, quantitative risk assessment approach, we helped Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) monetize natural hazard risks to their roads and bridges, and streamline their efforts to advance transportation resilience. 

Challenge

Like many transportation agencies across the U.S., ODOT has increasingly felt the impacts of extreme weather events such as floods washing out bridges or landslides and rockfalls damaging roadways. Although ODOT has a strong foundation in resilience planning, they lacked a comprehensive plan that streamlined their efforts to integrate resilience into standard decision-making processes. District engineers were also interested in advancing resilience through site-level projects, but wanted more information and resources to implement resilience strategies effectively.

To achieve its mission of providing a transportation system that is safe, accessible, well maintained, and positioned for the future, ODOT needed to improve its understanding of the most significant natural hazard risks to Ohio's transportation system. This information could help ODOT prioritize locations for targeted resilience investments, identify opportunities to build upon existing resilience practices, and better support District engineers with resilience projects.

ODOT sought to develop a Resilience Improvement Plan (RIP) that supported their mission and met the requirements of the Federal Highway Administration's (FHWA) Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient, and Cost-Saving Transportation (PROTECT) program to maximize the funding the state received through that program. State DOTs that develop RIPs according to the PROTECT requirements reduce the non-federal cost share for projects by 7%-10%. In addition to the RIP, ODOT wanted to develop a suite of resources to support Ohio municipalities and District engineers to further advance resilience through their own plans and projects.

Solution

We leveraged our resilience and transportation expertise to create a RIP for ODOT that goes above and beyond the PROTECT requirements to advance transportation resilience statewide and support implementation of future resilience projects. We also developed several supporting resources to help ODOT advance internal implementation of resilience best practices beyond the RIP.

As a foundation of the plan, we developed a risk-based assessment of the vulnerability of roads and bridges to flooding, landslides, and rockfalls. The risk assessment serves as a core component of the RIP and builds upon ODOT's previous vulnerability assessment (VA). ODOT's existing VA provided a qualitative vulnerability score for each asset on a scale of low to high. However, this scoring approach can be difficult to translate into monetary terms when prioritizing future investments and determining the potential return on investment for resilience solutions. We created a scalable, quantitative scoring methodology that results in an actionable, monetized risk value for each asset included in the assessment.

The risk value was determined based on the likelihood of a hazard occurring (e.g., roadway flooding) and the estimated cost of the impacts (i.e., cost to users and to the owner). Our innovative approach produced a quantitative risk assessment using data that ODOT already had available for thousands of transportation assets. This approach does not require intensive data collection and leverages data that most DOTs have at their fingertips, such as road and bridge inventory data. We ultimately helped ODOT understand natural hazard risks in monetized terms to support future decision-making and created a process to easily update the results in the future.

Results

This project resulted in an FHWA-approved RIP that will position ODOT to maximize the resources available under the PROTECT program, and a quantitative risk assessment that leverages readily available asset data. After assessing thousands of roads and bridges, we identified those with the highest annual cost of risk. This provides valuable insights to help ODOT quantify future returns on investment for resilience projects and strategies. Additionally, ODOT can easily update and refine the risk assessment in the future because it uses asset data that ODOT already collects and maintains on a regular basis, using an automated tool we developed through this project.

We also created actionable resilience resources to help ODOT move from resilience planning to implementation. Throughout the development of the RIP, in conjunction with stakeholders across the agency, we identified several opportunities to further advance resilience practices. After the RIP was completed, we created a suite of supporting materials to help ODOT implement priority resilience strategies:

• An automated tool to allow ODOT to easily update the assessment on a regular basis as more or better data become available.
• 14 site-level resilience cut sheets that summarize the risks at each site and potential strategies to address those risks.
• A menu of resilience strategies that demonstrates the range of resilience features that could be incorporated into future projects, from infrastructure hardening to natural infrastructure strategies. The menu includes information on the average cost of adding the feature to a project, common applications and challenges, and other co-benefits.
• Resilience planning guidance for Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) that are interested in developing their own RIPs. The guidance document outlines three different options for creating a RIP, with different levels of effort.
• A set of resilience performance measures that ODOT can leverage to monitor and evaluate resilience progress in the future and identify potential areas of improvement.
• Bridge deck elevation and overtopping likelihood data to refine the risk assessment results. Specifically, we processed LiDAR data to extract statewide bridge deck elevations and extracted base flood elevations from available Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data to determine the approximate clearance between the bridge deck height and the water level associated with a 100-year flood event. This bridge clearance data was incorporated into the risk assessment to provide a more nuanced understanding of overtopping likelihood across ODOT's bridges and better support future investment decisions.
• Flood tracking workgroup materials to help ODOT establish a working group to improve flood tracking in the future.

ODOT will use this suite of resources to support both project-level resilience efforts as well as broader organizational initiatives to mainstream resilience into decision-making. For example, we created an implementation plan for ODOT that outlines potential future responsibilities for a Resilience Champion at the Department as well as a Resilience Workgroup.