Building resilience of transport infrastructure through better land use planning

Transport infrastructure is one of the main critical infrastructure systems that contribute to the resilience of a community in the event of a disaster. Limitations to transport infrastructure create a cascading effect on environmental and other infrastructure systems which affect the society. Failure of transport infrastructure is often linked to many parameters which relate to decisions taken at the strategic planning level. Globally, cities expand annually and urbanisation brings many challenges for the planners. A review of practices adopted in strategic transport planning indicates that major mistakes could occur at the development approval process, where the decisions are made on new transport infrastructure. This paper examines typical strategic land use planning processes for transport infrastructure through a review of published work and Australian policies and standards. The link between the strategic policy documents and the development approval documentation are identified through the analysis of a case study. This process is used to identify the gaps in development approval process which later could lead to the failure of transport infrastructure. A process for quantifying the vulnerability of transport infrastructure is established by analysing the consequences of failure, likelihood and vulnerability of the community. Revisions to the approval processes are proposed at the local government level to reduce the risk of failure of transport infrastructure.