The COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial impacts across society and infrastructure systems. While many systems have been influenced, the transportation sector and its subsectors have been disproportionately affected. This disproportionality stems from the varied and diverse make-up of the sector, its interconnectivity to other critical systems, and the dependency of other systems on a highly functioning transportation sector. The disproportionality of impacts can be observed by examining three areas of the sector: air transportation, public transportation, and roadway transport. In 2020, we wrote a forum paper, at the time, it was apparent that air and public transportation acted as facilitators, if not carriers, at global and local levels, respectively, and have seen major losses in revenue and jobs. Roadway transport has been significantly disrupted, with many agencies reporting maximum statewide reductions in traffic of 40% or more. On the other hand, the road-way infrastructure has played a critical role in ensuring the delivery of essential goods and services as well as supply chain continuity. While this pandemic’s effect on the transportation infrastructure is less apparent than during natural disasters like hurricanes and floods, the impacts that are already clear across other areas of the transportation sector warrant reflection and action to consider how we might ensure that this infrastructure best contributes to a resilient transportation system. As already mentioned, we wrote a forum paper where focused exclusively on pavements. However, we believe that many of these ideas are applicable to other transportation infrastructure, which we define as the rigid assets (i.e., roads, bridges, runways, rails, and so forth) that make up the transportation system. Engineers know and understand that transportation infrastructure is vulnerable to natural forces, but COVID-19 has forced us to understand how anthropogenic forces introduce vulnerability as well. It has also shown us how frail and fragile our transportation systems (and, by extension, pavements and the network of pavements) are to unknowns and should provide impetus to more rapidly apply resilience-based thinking to our engineering and management of these networks. In the forum paper, our arguments span three topics: (1) the environment and hazards our infrastructure is designed for; (2) the sources of funding (and limitations therein) and tools and policies of infrastructure management, including the models that we use to predict the long-term performance of infrastructural elements; and (3) our current risk-based thinking against resilience-based thinking for better adaptation and sustainability under future disruptions. Center to these arguments is an emphasis to include the human component in our thinking about pavements, not just as a benefactor or user, but also as a hazard and, therefore, a critical variable to consider as we plan, design, and manage these variables.
For more details, please check out: Gulzar, S., Richard Kim, Y., Castorena, C. and Shane Underwood, B., 2021. COVID-19, uncertainty, and the need for resilience-based thinking in pavement engineering. Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part B: Pavements, 147(1), p.02520001.