Not long after I contributed to CIHT’s report in my role as Director of DARe (National Hub for Decarbonised, Adaptable, and Resilient Transport Infrastructures), I read news reports about Snake Pass, part of the A57 running through the Peak District, which had to close to for several days due to a landslip, as it has several times in recent years.

Derbyshire Council is constrained by its £27m yearly road budget and are lobbying for a landslip fund. Even then, they know that it'll probably just be impacted again next time there's an extreme amount of rainfall in that area. Ultimately, they say they may have to let that infrastructure fail, whereupon it no longer becomes a managed route for road transport.

These are the kind of hard decisions that need to be made about our transport network: how resilient do you make your infrastructure? What level of failure will you allow? Only under highly extreme conditions? Or can it be designed in a way that when failure does occur, it can recover quickly and go back to a good level of performance? Or in cases like Snake Pass, can we afford to save it at all?

Resilience hitting the headlines

Inevitably, of course, it comes down to cost, and the industry is at least trying hard to identify where they need more information. With insights such as the Delivering a resilient transport network report and projects like the DARe data hub, we can begin to provide the best possible evidence so local authorities can make more informed decisions on investment in existing infrastructures and how we achieve greater resilience.

There’s also the question of where we put new infrastructure. The easiest thing is to build on flood plains, where the land is relatively cheap, then not put in big enough sewers to futureproof them for very long, because it's a bit more expensive. But it’s a lot cheaper to put it in when you build in the first place than to fix the damage a few years later.

So long-term thinking is essential, and the investment that government has made in organisations like DARe and other initiatives shows they're beginning to think about this and put measures in place. But it has to be tackled across numerous government departments, which often work in silo for all sorts of reasons. To address these problems, we need to make sure they’re all joined up.

One thing we have noticed over the last year is that more people are talking about resilience. You heard even the politicians talking about it during the election, which we’ve never really heard before. Even if people don't fully understand it, they recognise resilience is on the agenda and has to be a priority. The transport industry does too, and I’m hoping that the subject will only continue to grow in prominence.

Image: Snake Pass in Derbyshire, UK; credit: Alamy.