Resilience of ground transportation networks: a case study on Melbourne

A city with a transportation system so well designed that failure of any arbitrary waypoint triggers no major event, is the major goal for every single urban planning and management board. However, city planning comes with inherent design constraints. Research is needed to understand the interaction between these constraints and city resilience. This understanding is useful for those planning for a new city and more importantly, when evaluating and designing cost-effective ways to improve the resilience of existing cities. In this paper, we promote a proactive attitude for prevention. We use network analysis to estimate the resilience of ground transportation system in Melbourne. Real data extracted from GPS navigation maps of Melbourne is used and resilience is computed for train, tram and street networks. The interdependency and interaction of these networks is then used to risk assess Melbourne’s transportation system. The system-level risk identification process paints a risk picture for Melbourne City ground transport system. The approach can be generalised to any piece of ground covered by a GPS navigation map, being a promising cost-effective, systemic and structured approach to quantify and manage risk of virtually any city in the world.