Public Transit and TDM Response to Pandemic Influenza

Researchers at the Center for Urban Transportation Research have begun to investigate and seek funding to study the impact of pandemic flu on public transit as well as the potential role of public transit and TDM agencies in such an emergency.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it is not a matter of if, but a matter of when a pandemic flu strikes the United States. Currently, federal and state governments are developing plans to respond to a pandemic flu. At this point, the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HSS) National Plan only contains a statement referring to the closure of public transportation as a community containment measure.

Health departments and emergency operations centers at the local level will bear the burden of response to a pandemic. The proposed research will develop an action plan for transit agencies to provide resources and assistance in coordination with local emergency responders. This action plan also would help transit agencies safeguard staff, prepare for workforce disruptions due to mass illness, develop contingency systems to maintain essential or altered service during quarantine and mitigate the impact of shut downs. The research will also look at how TDM agencies and organization can help employers prepare response plans that may heavily rely on telecommuting and the maintenance of the communication infrastructure.

Since a pandemic could occur at any time, it is important to provide a useful products as soon as possible followed by products that provide more specific planning strategies. For transit agencies, the first product will be a Transit Agency Checklist, modeled after the checklists designed by the HHS and CDC for families and business. The final product will be a detailed guidebook for transit agencies to customize their own Pandemic Flu Action Plan. On the TDM side, CUTR will look into developing a toolkit that TDM professionals can use to help employers develop a response plan.

We are very interested to hear from others concerning TDM's potential role in responding to a pandemic or how they plan to become involved in the local prepartation process.

CHRIS HAGELIN

Peak Oil and the Army Corp of Engineers

According to a September 2005 report by the Army Corp of Engineers entitled "Energy Trends and Implications for U.S. Army Installations, "world oil production is at or near its peak and current world demand exceeds supply."

The Army Corp of Engineers goes on to say:


"The supply of oil will remain fairly stable in the very near term, but oil prices will steadily increase as world production approaches its peak. The doubling of oil prices in the past couple of years is not an anomaly, but a picture of the future. Peak oil is at hand with low availability growth for the next 5 to 10 years. Once worldwide petroleum production peaks, geopolitics and market economics will result in even more significant price increases and security risks. To guess where this is all going to take us is would be too speculative. Oil wars are certainly not out of the question. Disruption of world oil markets may also affect world natural gas markets as much of the natural gas reserves are collocated with the oil reserves."

The document can be found via the Association for the Study of Peak Oil at:

http://www.peakoil.net/Articles2005/Westervelt_EnergyTrends__TN.pdf

What this says to me is that the idea of peak oil is gaining greater credibility and already part of the working assumption of the US Army.

And as I have been saying for the last couple years, the TDM community needs to jump on this and makes sure that TDM is one of the first strategies that federal decision-makers think of in terms of how this nation responds to mitigate the impact of peak oil. The question is what is the best way to promote TDM as one of the most cost effective ways of not only dealing with congestion, but also America's oil dependence. What are your thoughts?

CHRIS HAGELIN, CUTR