State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) understand the value of resilience planning but have no clear roadmap for consistently incorporating associated practices into their programs.

The National Cooperative Highway Research Program selected AEM’s Transportation Services team to document the state of practice for risk and resilience at the state level and assess barriers to its effective implementation. Through NCHRP Project 20-05, AEM conducted a literature review, administered a national survey of state DOTs, and developed multiple case studies.

AEM validated that many DOTs are in early stages of incorporating resilience efforts into areas such as planning, engineering, construction, maintenance, operations and administration. While DOTs expressed interest in incorporating resilience into their decision-making process, they indicated that new methods to model and measure risk and resilience will need to be developed before easy adoption.

Additionally, DOTs expressed the need for more buy-in from management to support resilience analysis, the importance for a range of staff to be engaged in assessments, and the value of reaching out to non-traditional partners to capitalize on needed and unique data and modeling capabilities.