Understanding and measuring transportation resilience for communities is of interest to state departments of transportation (DOTs). While transportation professionals have established measures of resilience for specific infrastructure, organizations, or supply chains, the metrics and definitions are lacking for community mobility. Transportation resilience continues to grow in importance, and this gap in practice needs to be addressed. Beyond natural hazards, community mobility resilience addresses factors such as increasing system demand, technology and mobility advancement risks, and institutional issues such as risk appetites and scarce resources.

Research is needed to help state DOTs identify appropriate performance metrics of community resilience for their transportation systems. In particular, the research should:

•       Confirm definitions of risk and resilience in use today to determine if there is consensus on the definitions for risk, criticality, consequence, and other essential terms.
•        Develop the elements of community resilience, to include community mobility, or mobility and destination access across a jurisdiction of any size, for all users and modes. This is distinct from infrastructure-focused resilience for a specific asset (e.g., a bridge).
•        Identify effective performance measures. Define performance measures for the resilience community based on relevant, feasible, and quantifiable evidence of improved resilience. These metrics should measure continuous data in the form of substantive change and performance in resilience as opposed to activity metrics already in play or project-specific evaluations. They should also reflect disparate impacts on mobile communities and other communities with inflated risks due to geographic isolation and other issues.

The objective of this research is to develop a guide to identify and define performance metrics for community resilience that reflects current definitions, goals, and performance measures of community resilience.