Building a Framework for Transportation Resiliency and Evaluating the Resiliency Benefits of

Justification for transportation infrastructure and major transit investments are often measured in terms of mobility improvements, congestion relief, environmental benefits, operating efficiencies, cost effectiveness, and/or economic impacts (ECONorthwest and PBQD 2002). Calculating such measures is an important step in alternative analysis; however, these same measures – even in combination – fail to properly illustrate the added resiliency provided by a diversity of mode options and compact, mixed-use, mixed-income, transit-rich developments. Transit-based cities, for instance, have been shown to allocate between one-third and two-thirds less wealth on transportation as compared to automobile-based cities (Newman and Kenworthy 1999; Newman, Beatley et al. 2009). Accordingly, regions with a better transit infrastructure would be able to better cope with exogenous influences such as fluctuating gas prices. In other words, a community with considerable transit infrastructure – even if experiencing minimal ridership today – would be able to withstand a shock to the system such as rising gas prices far better than an auto-dependent city that has not invested in transit. More specifically, this conceptualization of resiliency to something like rising gas prices is not comparable to elasticity studies that have considered how relatively minor gas price adjustments have impacted trave