Resiliency Planning

Building a more resilient transportation sector requires a systems approach: considering flood-plains, storm water management, watershed hydraulics, hazard mitigation, and more, in addition to assessing the transportation assets themselves. As such, H-GAC’s transportation resilience work will be coordinated with and will build off of the Agency’s other resiliency-related work.

Resiliency and Durability Pilot

Due to the growing number, and associated impact, of natural disasters, increased attention and funding is being directed at improving resiliency in the transportation sector.

To develop transportation-sector specific resiliency best practices and strategies across the country, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) launched a Resilience Pilots program. In 2018, the Houston-Galveston Area Council (H-GAC) was selected to participate as one of eleven pilots under the program’s third—and current—round to funding to develop Resilience and Durability to Extreme Weather Pilot Program projects.

Vulnerability Assessment

Beginning in Spring 2019, H-GAC has been working with federal, state, and local partners to conduct a vulnerability assessment of transportation assets in the 8-County Houston-Galveston Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) region.

The vulnerability assessment will follow the FHWA’s Vulnerability Assessment Scoring Tool (VAST) methodology and will include consideration of exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, economic impact, and risk. Resiliency recommendations will be developed based on vulnerability assessment results.

Vulnerability assessment results will also be used to prioritize funding for transportation projects and will inform future versions of the long-range transportation plan.