Impacts of Urban Floods on Road Connectivity - A Review and Systematic Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Urban floods are paralyzing surface transportation and inflicting heavy economic losses. Climate-induced increase in frequency and intensity of rainfalls and excessive urbanization makes urban centers even more vulnerable to floods. It is necessary to quantify all dimensions of losses caused to road connectivity to improve flood mitigation policy. There is a need to consolidate the existing body of peer-reviewed contemporary literature on flood inundation modeling and its impacts on road connectivity. This will improve the awareness of policymakers and researchers and help in science-based decision making. Articles archived in the Web of Science database having the keywords floods and road in their title published between 1977 and 2020 were analyzed using the blibliometrix library of R. Analysis shows that the flood inundation and flood extent modeling has evolved from the conventional hydrological models to the near real-time crowd-sourced modeling methods. Applications of geographical information systems and advanced remote sensing methods have been growing in identifying road network vulnerabilities. We observed a gap in harmonized data availability, due to the unstructured data formats at several scales, which hinders a generalized approach for flood risk modeling studies for urban planning. Concentrated efforts have to be made to fill the gaps in data availability and research methodologies, especially using crowd-sourced data. Further, efforts have to be made to increase awareness, early warning systems, and alternate transport networks, to make the cities less vulnerable to floods.

Boundary Layer Modelling of Flow Acceleration and Energy Transfer Effects in Smart Pavement Design

“…The impacts on roads due to microfloods are more evident in the chain of events that follow from the progressive micro and macro-physical damage to pavements to the affectance of the skid/antiskid characteristics of the road surface, the compromised safety of road users and disruption to travel in terms of increase travel times, but to name a few. These effects according to [19] in their review of the impacts of urban floods on roads and connectivity, were more significant on the middle and lower-middle income groups in the developing countries. Retaining pavement runoff water on road surfaces remained an indication of a lack of natural flood mitigation capability, and its impacts according to [20] could only be compensated for and addressed by implementing systematic stormwater management practices.…”

A Systematic Literature Review of the Hybrid Methodologies in Assessing Flood Indirect Impacts on Transportation

“…Tachaudomdach et al [8] conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) on the resilience of transportation infrastructures affected by flooding. Their review, similar to Kadaverugu et al [7], covers studies related to the direct impacts of floods on transportation networks from 1998 to 2018. Forero-Ortiz et al [10] A review of flood impact assessment approaches for underground infrastructures in urban areas: a focus on transport systems…”

“…Kadaverugu et al [7] focused mainly on the direct impacts of flooding on road networks in their study. Their analysis provides a comprehensive discussion of various flood models applied in flooded road networks, highlighting the progress from classical hydrological models to near real-time crowd-sourced modeling techniques.…”

The influence of road network topology on street flooding in New York City—A social media data approach

“…The impact of flooding on road networks and traffic systems has received significant research attention in recent years (Britain & Brown, 2014). Several studies over the last decade have investigated weather impacts on the road network, including topics of flooding disaster measures, road systems management strategies, and road system's adaptation to flooding disasters (Hammond et al, 2015;Kadaverugu et al, 2021;Kramer et al, 2016). However, existing research assessing the impact of flooding on the road did not capture the complexity of their interactions (Pregnolato et al, 2017), especially the possibility of two directions exchanges between the sewage network and the street, quantifying the influence between the road network and urban flooding is thus particularly complicated (Paquier & Bazin, 2014).…”