Vulnerability analysis of transportation network under scenarios of sea level rise

Climate change is attracting increasing attention from transportation planners, engineers, and decision makers. As a result of climate change, sea level rise is rapidly becoming a major concern, especially for coastal regions. This paper develops an accessibility-based process to analyze transportation network vulnerability to quantify networkwide vulnerability and to identify the most vulnerable regions under different scenarios of sea level rise. The accessibility reduction rate before and after inundation is calculated to measure the potential consequences. The probability of different sea level rise scenarios-together with the overall accessibility reduction-contributes to the overall vulnerability of the transportation network. Most notably, the traffic analysis zones with the most accessibility reduction are considered the most vulnerable areas. This methodology is applied to the south Miami, Florida, road network under two sea level rise scenarios for 2060. The authors estimated the extent of road network vulnerability and accessibility reduction of individual traffic analysis zones for the two scenarios. The results show an almost 100% accessibility reduction for traffic analysis zones with all roads inundated and as high as 30% accessibility reduction in zones with some or no roads directly affected. This information can help local transportation planners, engineers, and decision makers identify the most vulnerable areas and transportation facilities resulting from sea level rise so as to make better and more informed decisions about adaptation planning and retrofitting.