Risk-based adaptive management for future land development adjacent to critical transportation infrastructure systems

The National Research Council identified a critical need for methods that protect multimodal transportation corridors from adjacent land development. Risk-based methods are essential to avoid costly retrofits, regret, and belated action by infrastructure owners, regional and local planners, and developers. This paper develops and tests threat and vulnerability analysis for land development adjacent to 6,000 miles of multimodal corridors in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The technical approach has several parts: (i) creating an inventory of approximately 70,000 existing access points on the corridors, (ii) identification and analysis of outliers in the densities of access points for one-mile sections of corridor, (iii) comparison of the access points with local traffic volumes and predictions of land development on a fifteen year horizon, and (iv) generation of priorities and recommendations for risk-based adaptive management that can include closing access points, restricting development, and negotiating between agencies and developers.¹ The results are useful for allocating resources to vulnerable sections of transportation corridor and for helping to ensure sustainable performance of these infrastructure systems into the future.