A Multi-Scale Validation and Analysis of Flash Flooding Impacts on Urban Road Transportation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on intelligent transportation systems Vol. 25; no. 11; pp. 16869 - 16880
• Main Authors: Du, Chongyang, Ouyang, Min, Fan, Chao
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.11.2024
• Subjects: Accidents; Analytical models; Flash flooding impact; Floods; model validation; multi-scale assessment; Rain; Roads; Transportation; Urban areas; urban road transportation
• ISSN: 1524-9050; 1558-0016
• DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2024.3416368

The impacts of flash flooding on road transportation, such as travel time delays, are crucial concerns by different stakeholders including neighborhoods and governments at all levels, which calls for a multi-scale flooding impact assessment. Although existing methods have such a capacity, they are not effectively validated, limiting our understanding of the impacts for successful flooding management. This paper develops a multi-scale flooding impact assessment framework and a validation method applied to road transportation in Wuhan, China. Using real-world traffic data in a historical flooding event, the validation results show the capability of the framework in predicting the post-flooding travel time of trips across different scales. The framework is further used to predict travel time delays in flooding at neighborhood, district, and city scales during peak-traffic periods. Results show that while flooding primarily impacts commuting times in central city areas, the integration of traffic accidents in flooding expands the impact to districts and communities farther away from the city center. At the city scale, our analysis indicates that the travel time to workplaces is mostly increased, compared to the increase in travel time to critical facilities. The proposed framework is also adopted to prioritize the treatment of flood-prone sites. These results show the potential of the framework to help flooding response and mitigation.