Resilience Primer for Transportation Executives (2021)

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1   Get out there in front. Be bold. Everything the chief executive officers (CEOs) of state departments of transportation (DOTs) and everyone else in their agencies do is based in resilience. All of the DOT’s achievements, difficulties, necessities, and plans—even reports on ordinary activities—have the promise of resilience in them. That promise is: We are working hard to be sure your transportation needs are met, and, if they are interrupted, it won’t be for long. As CEO of a transportation agency, you have the responsibility to plan, deliver, operate, and maintain a safe transportation network, so essential to the economic well-being of your state. Critical corridors of commerce need to be resilient during extreme weather events and other disruptions. Making the network resilient depends on both technical and policy factors, and there are significant roles only you can play. NCHRP Research Report 976: Resilience Primer for Transportation Executives (Primer) identifies what you can do and ways you can incorporate resilience practices into the day-to-day operation of your agency as well as into your long-range planning. Potential and real disruptions to a DOT’s service, reliability, and safety—from extreme weather, natural disasters, cyber incidents, system failures, or combinations of these— are on the rise. Other challenges, such as a pandemic, may not damage infrastructure but demonstrate the criticality of the supply chain and the importance of comprehensive workforce protection. Also rising are customers’ expectations for system performance and reliability—and their intolerance for delay. The result is increased public and political demand for DOTs to solve problems resulting from disruptions before they become critical. Several widely used definitions of resilience share the same idea: resilience means fore- casting what could happen, coping with the consequences of a disruptive event, and looking ahead to be readier than before to face future disruptions. The core ideas of resilience— anticipating, adapting, preparing, and then bouncing back from disruption even stronger— apply to every major business function in a transportation agency. DOT CEOs across the United States contributed to the Primer and shared their approaches to becoming a transportation agency that is resilient—proactive in maintenance and opera- tions and ready to minimize or avoid future disruptions. A culture of resilience grows out of making resilience part of everyone’s job until it is functionally second nature, just as the idea of safety has become embedded in transportation culture. A resilient agency can deter problems and take action before a disruption becomes disastrous. A resilient transporta- tion system improves safety and saves the state money, the public time, and the agency its respect and reputation. S U M M A R Y Resilience Primer for Transportation Executives

2 Resilience Primer for Transportation Executives Actions You Can Take as CEO to Make Your Agency More Resilient • Promote the importance of resilience to your agency, to your governor, and to your state. • Be actively engaged in resilience efforts. – Know the most likely disruptions that could happen and what the impact is likely to be so that your plans can be future fit. – Be part of the development of mitigation/adaptation approaches and the preparation of build-back strategies; ensure that crosscutting teams [e.g., operations and maintenance (O&M) and planning and development] are involved. – Make resilience part of the agency funding criteria to support planning for future events. – Engage your partners in state and local governments and the private and nonprofit sectors, especially in investment planning for resilience (e.g., strengthening mutually interdependent critical infrastructure systems, such as communications; power; water; and roads, bridges, and tunnels). • Model the importance of resilience in your words and actions. – Support time spent by staff on resilience and encourage discussions within and across disciplines, regions, and agencies. – Incorporate resilience as a high-level performance factor, especially in support of cross- functional collaboration. • Foster preparedness and resilience efforts. – Integrate resilience into planning and programming, building in flexibility for changing conditions and environments. – Leverage asset management life-cycle and risk assessments to help plan preventive measures, prioritize response, and coordinate recovery. – Incorporate resilience into design, engineering, and O&M to reduce vulnerabilities and mitigate consequences of events. – View emergency management and response in a resilience context, learn from events (lessons about design as well as operations), and highlight your successes to advocate for resources to improve resilience in the future. • Capitalize on the resilience theme in agency communications. Broadly share the work your agency is doing to reduce future disruptions. • See technology through a resilience lens and identify new materials and technologies that can increase resilience. • Address cybersecurity early and often and recognize that cyber resilience is a continuous process of monitoring and adapting to new vulnerabilities. Whatever you call it, customers expect this work to be done. They expect us to keep things working.