Lockdown lifted:measuring spatial resilience from London’s public transport demand recovery

The disruptive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly shifted how individuals navigate in cities.Governments are concerned that travel behavior will shift toward a car-driven and homeworking future,shifting demand away from public transport use.These concerns place the recovery of public transport in a possible crisis.A resilience perspective may aid the discussion around recovery-particularly one that deviates from pre-pandemic behavior.This paper presents an empirical study of London’s public transport demand and introduces a perspective of spatial resilience to the existing body of research on post-pandemic public transport demand.This study defines spatial resilience as the rate of recovery in public transport demand within census boundaries over a period after lockdown restrictions were lifted.The relationship between spatial resilience and urban socioeconomic factors was investigated by a global spatial regression model and a localized perspective through Geographically Weighted Regression(GWR)model.In this case study of London,the analysis focuses on the period after the first COVID-19 lockdown restrictions were lifted(June 2020)and before the new restrictions in mid-September 2020.The analysis shows that outer London generally recovered faster than inner London.Factors of income,car ownership and density of public transport infrastructure were found to have the greatest influence on spatial patterns in resilience.Furthermore,influential relationships vary locally,inviting future research to examine the drivers of this spatial heterogeneity.Thus,this research recommends transport policymakers capture the influences of homeworking,ensure funding for a minimum level of service,and advocate for a polycentric recovery post-pandemic.

Spatial Resilience to Wildfires through the Optimal Deployment of Firefighting Resources:Impact of Topography on Initial Attack Effectiveness

Strongly affected by the escalating impacts of climate change,wildfires have been increasing in frequency and severity around the world.The primary aim of this study was the development of specific territorial measures—estimating the optimal locations of firefighting resources—to enhance the spatial resilience to wildfires in the fire-prone region of Chalkidiki Prefecture in northern Greece.These measures focus on the resistance to wildfires and the adaptation of strategies to wildfire management,based on the estimation of burn probability,including the effect of anthropogenic factors on fire ignition.The proposed location schemes of firefighting resources such as vehicles consider both the susceptibility to fire and the influence of the topography on travel simulation,highlighting the impact of road slope on the initial firefighting attack.The spatial scheme,as well as the number of required firefighting forces is totally differentiated due to slope impact.When we ignore the topography effect,a minimum number of fire vehicles is required to achieve the maximization of coverage(99.2%of the entire study area)giving priority to the most susceptible regions(that is,employing 18 of 24 available fire vehicles).But when we adopt more realistic conditions that integrate the slope effect with travel time,the model finds an optimal solution that requires more resources(that is,employing all 24 available fire vehicles)to maximize the coverage of the most vulnerable regions within 27 min.This process achieves 80%of total coverage.The proposed methodology is characterized by a high degree of flexibility,and provides optimized solutions to decision makers,while considering key factors that greatly affect the effectiveness of the initial firefighting attack.