What Happened?
Local transit agencies are working with research institutions to develop new strategies and technologies to aid in emergency preparedness programs.
Argonne National Laboratory
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, received a $2.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration to determine how transit systems in major cities can more effectively respond to emergencies. The laboratory will focus its research on the Chicago transit system as a model, experimenting with new strategies for coping with crisis situations such as massive snowstorms or flooding.
Argonne will use funding to study methods and create tools for building more resilient mass transit systems to evacuate city residents in the event of an emergency. Researchers will investigate ways to improve detection, analysis and response to emergencies as well as new evacuation processes.
If evacuation procedures and transit system are not coordinated properly, a state of emergency could have catastrophic consequences on public safety. Using Argonne’s POLARIS system – an open-source high-speed computing tool – the researchers will create tools to provide complex modeling and simulation of how people navigate the city via mass transportation. The researchers will run simulated emergency events to:
- Identify weaknesses in the transit system
- Investigate new technologies to integrate resilience into the system
- Develop new techniques for quickly moving people in a disaster
- Provide real-time assistance during an emergency by enabling officials to see transit assets
- Estimate population distribution and characteristics to protect at-risk populations
Because Chicago houses the second largest public transit system in the U.S. and has unique transit challenges associated with surrounding bodies of water, the researchers hope to develop a broad set of tools that can be scaled to other communities across the country. The project will be managed by Argonne’s Transportation Research and Analysis Computing Center and collaborate with local transportation agencies to gather resources and information.
Portland State University
The Federal Transit Administration has also allocated a $945,000 grant to Portland State University’s Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) project to help transportation agencies respond to regional emergencies.
In collaboration with local transit agencies, the academic researchers will develop and test a transportation demand management system that leverages social medial and intelligent transit systems for large-scale emergency response and recovery. Because many emergency recovery plans fail to address demand management needs, the project will study how transit can keep a city functioning during the response period as well as throughout recovery.
Once the system has been tested and deployed in the Portland area, the researchers will help six other transportation agencies across the country implement the technology within their own systems.
FTA Grant
Both grants were made available through the FTA’s Innovative Safety, Resiliency and All-Hazards Emergency Response and Recovery Demonstration program. These grants fund innovative research and demonstration projects that develop and showcase innovative technologies, methods, practices and techniques to improve operational safety, infrastructure resilience, and emergency response and recovery capacities of transportation networks.
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