Resilience of Railway Transport to Four Types of Natural Hazards: An Analysis of Daily Train Volumes
German Centre for Rail Traffic Research, 01219 Dresden, Germany
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Davide Forcellini
Infrastructures 2021, 6(12), 174; https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures6120174
Received: 24 November 2021
/
Revised: 2 December 2021
/
Accepted: 6 December 2021
/
Published: 8 December 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Resilience of Infrastructures to Natural Hazards)
A crucial step in measuring the resilience of railway infrastructure is to quantify the extent of its vulnerability to natural hazards. In this paper, we analyze the vulnerability of the German railway network to four types of natural hazards that regularly cause disruptions in German rail operations: floods, mass movements, slope fires, and tree falls. Using daily train traffic data matched with various data on disruptive events, we quantify the extent to which these four types of natural hazard reduce daily train traffic volumes. With a negative binomial count data regression, we find evidence that the track segments of the German railway network are most vulnerable to floods, followed by mass movements and tree-fall events. On average, floods reduce traffic on track segments by 19% of the average daily train traffic, mass movements by 16%, and tree fall by 4%. Moreover, when more than one type of natural hazard affects the track segment on the same day, train traffic on that segment falls by 34% of the average train traffic. Slope fires have an ambiguous and nonrobust effect on train traffic due to the reverse causality due to its triggering factors. This is the first study that attempts to rank different natural hazards according to their impact on railway traffic. The results have implications for the selection of resilience strategy and can help prioritize policy measures.
View Full-Text
▼
Show Figures
Figure 1
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
MDPI and ACS Style
Fabella, V.M.; Szymczak, S. Resilience of Railway Transport to Four Types of Natural Hazards: An Analysis of Daily Train Volumes. Infrastructures 2021, 6, 174. https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures6120174
AMA Style
Fabella VM, Szymczak S. Resilience of Railway Transport to Four Types of Natural Hazards: An Analysis of Daily Train Volumes. Infrastructures. 2021; 6(12):174. https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures6120174
Chicago/Turabian StyleFabella, Vigile Marie, and Sonja Szymczak. 2021. "Resilience of Railway Transport to Four Types of Natural Hazards: An Analysis of Daily Train Volumes" Infrastructures 6, no. 12: 174. https://doi.org/10.3390/infrastructures6120174
Find Other Styles
Note that from the first issue of 2016, MDPI journals use article numbers instead of page numbers. See further details here.
