Sungbin Cho

Earthquake Disaster Mitigation for Urban Transportation Systems: An Integrated Methodology that Builds on the Kobe and Northridge Experiences

Around the world, natural disasters kill thousands each year and inflict billions of dollars in damage. Better analysis has the potential to save lives and resources on a large scale. One of the most important applications of economic analysis is to the evaluation of proposed projects and policy measures, usually benefit-cost analysis. A related but different approach involves regional economic impact analysis. Whereas benefit-cost analysis can be used to rank policy measures in terms of their efficient use of resources, impact analysis offers a reading of how far these measures deviate the local economy from current performance levels. The simplest examples are the widely reported multiplier analyses wherein proponents of certain projects (sports stadia, convention centers, etc.) claim that some multiple of annual expenditures will enhance the regional economy because of various ripple effects. Our claim in this research is that some available economic impact models when properly modified and elaborated lend themselves to the problem of determining plausible evaluations of earthquake mitigation and reconstruction policies for metropolitan areas.

Using Regional Economic Models to Estimate the Costs of Infrastructure Failures: The Cost of a Limited Interruption in Electric Power in the Los Angeles Region

An integrated model of losses caused by infrastructure failures is presented together with an example application to interruptions in electric power. The model estimates how these losses affect the metropolitan economy. This measurement accounts for direct, indirect, and induced costs that can result from infrastructure failures. The procedure advances the information provided by transportation and activity system analysis techniques in ways that help capture the most important economic implications of infrastructure failures. Transportation network costs and origin-destination requirements are modeled endogenously and consistently. The overall research framework permits these full costs to be expressed in aggregate terms at a submetropolitan level as well as in a distributional sense.

Modeling Transportation Network Flows as a Simultaneous Function of Travel Demand, Earthquake Damage, and Network Level Service

This paper summarizes the results of a transportation analysis incorporating a novel approach to modeling variable transportation demand. This approach links the demand for destinations to the level of service available on the transportation network. The paper includes applications to a set of predicted, post-earthquake transportation network configurations for the city of Memphis, Tennessee, and to network damage resulting from a large scenario earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area.