EAGER: SAI: Understanding Social and Cultural Processes to Improve Transportation Infrastructure Planning

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering. 

The frequency and magnitude of flooding is increasing in the United States. Flooding heavily impacts the structural integrity of roads and transportation infrastructure. Transportation planners are starting to implement mitigation strategies aimed at proactively enhancing infrastructure to reduce or eliminate risk from such potential hazards.

One challenge is that not every flood risk can be mitigated. As a result, transportation planners must decide which communities should receive highest priority. Traditional engineering and planning approaches base these decisions mainly on technical criteria and do not incorporate social and psychological impacts of damaged transportation infrastructure.

This research seeks to better understand the behavioral, psychological, and social consequences of damaged transportation infrastructure. Anticipated results will support the creation of metrics that planners can use to prioritize investing in transportation infrastructure in a way that mitigates both flood risks and adverse socio-behavioral impacts on individuals and communities.

The research is organized in three modules. The first examines how flooding events have historically impacted community mobility by using large-scale aggregate, anonymized mobility data collected from smartphones and other devices. The second module examines the social and psychological consequences associated with disrupted travel.

These impacts include emotional consequences, cognitive functioning, and time poverty. The final module explores how flood risk, mobility impacts, social vulnerability, and psychological consequences can be integrated into comprehensive metrics, what factors are associated with public acceptance of such metrics, and how transportation planners consider the use of such metrics.

The multi-method research includes analyses of aggregated mobility data, large-scale survey of respondents in flood prone areas, statistical analysis of aggregating metrics, and qualitative interviews with transportation planners. This SAI project demonstrates how research in social-behavioral science and civil engineering can be integrated to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the social, psychological, and built environments, and how decisions about managing risks to transportation infrastructure can be improved.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.