Transportation planning methodologies for post-disaster recovery in regional communities: the East Japan Earthquake and tsunami 2011

Spatial planning provides tools to government authorities that support integrated response strategies as part of the disaster management but regional communities outside of the metropolitan areas often lack the necessary capacity and resources to implement these approaches. Unlike in the USA, there are no guidelines for transportation planners in coping with post-disaster situations in Japan. There is a substantive literature on institutions, concepts of urban sustainability and resilience, community engagement and travel behavioral adjustments to natural disasters and man-made disruptions to transportation supply in the emergency phase but only limited research into travel demand modeling in the recovery phase. This paper focuses on the recovery phase - and constructs conceptual and operational demand and supply models for the recovery phase to help seek options for more sustainable outcome. The methodology is applied to the city of Ishinomaki, Japan, one of the many regional communities devastated by the March, 2011 earthquake and tsunami where only limited capacity and data are available. Future hypothetical scenarios for the city are analyzed to illustrate the potential practicality of the proposed methodology with the indicators of travel performance of the scenarios in the case study area. The paper concludes with implication to planning, including the full re-location of peninsular villages, and further research needs.