An indicator-based methodology for assessing resilience in urban mobility

Resilience is an increasingly more important concept to understand the response urban systems are able to deliver to endogenous and exogenous shocks in the current context of climate change and socioeconomic uncertainty. Urban mobility, a fundamental component of urban systems, is naturally sensitive to shocks with significant impacts on daily life of individuals and businesses. The concept of resilience in urban mobility is under intensive research with increasingly more sophisticated approaches and methods being developed to assess resilience in transport modes due to different shocks. The literature is, however, absent on applications aimed at using simpler mobility indicators that are used and validated in urban mobility planning processes in the context of lack of data or expertise. We propose a resilience evaluation method that uses commonly available origin-destination (OD) datasets to evaluate an overall indicator of resilience. We consider the possibility of trips made in motorised modes to be transferred to active modes in the event of a disruption of the mobility system. Results of the application of the method to two urban areas in Brazil show that each one has a specific pattern of mode change that is related to the OD patterns. The spatial distribution of trips shows the relative importance of resilient trips in the urban area. Finally, different levels of income have different sensitivity to the variation of resilience.