Redundancy: The Lesson from the Loma Prieta Earthquake

Melvin W. Webber

University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers from University of California Transportation Center

Abstract: The big news from the Bay Area's 1989 earthquake was that the transportation disruptions were only inconvenient, not dreadful. Structural failures on the Bay Bridge and several elevated concrete freeways cut major metropolitan commuting routes. Nevertheless, the regional transportation system didn't crash at the time. It was resilient because it was redundant - the parallel links took up the burden. Commuters got to work without intolerable hardship. Trucks got their freight delivered, nearly on time. Some businesses suffered in the short-term, but only a few failed. Estimates place direct losses from the Loma Prieta quake at over $8 billion dollars, making it the costliest natural disaster in American history at the time. In addition, some costs must be assigned to the secondary losses resulting from the breakdown in accessibility. The surprise is that the losses were so low. Our studies into the effects of breaks in the metropolitan transportation network reveal three major reasons why traffic disaster did not follow the earthquake disaster.

Keywords: Social and Behavioral Sciences; Life Sciences; Engineering; Loma Prieta earthquake; commuters; Bay Area; infrastructure; BART; transit systems; redundancy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1992-09-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/8px9r9jx.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:uctcwp:qt8px9r9jx

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California Transportation Center, Working Papers from University of California Transportation Center Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().