Abstract

Public service infrastructure will increasingly be impacted by climate change and has therefore to become more resilient against extreme weather events and other climate change-related effects. A central part of urban infrastructure is public transit, often mainly consisting of interacting light-rail as well as express and community bus networks. To increase such a system’s resilience against small disturbances and larger outages – as they might result from climate change – service providers need a toolbox of potential measures to mitigate such incidents’ impact and to re-establish services as soon as possible after an outage. This paper presents a bi-modal urban transit simulation system covering both light rail and (express and community) bus networks. Central aims of the system are to enable operators to evaluate measures against small disturbances and larger outages as they happen, and to evaluate what combination of disaster risk management and resilience-building strategies shows most potential to help increasing the resilience of urban transit systems against extreme weather events resulting from climate change as well as other disasters.