Economic costs of critical infrastructure failure in bi-national regions and implications for resilience building: Evidence from El Paso–Ciudad Juarez

Transport infrastructure of the ports-of-entry (POEs) and the Bridge of the Americas (BOTA) in the El Paso–Juarez region is important for international trade and economic vitality for both countries. This paper's contribution lies in the use of a bi-national dynamic traffic assignment model that is calibrated for the region to obtain temporal insights into daily travel effects and economic costs of an unintended disruption of the POE approach infrastructure. Travel effects and costs are evaluated for a before-and-after comparative study and changes in both daily static and dynamic travel times are considered. The model considers flow directionality, allowing the framework to isolate international flows from domestic trips for the determination of direct costs. Delays at POEs are treated exogenously since inspections are not part of the model. Simulation results show that the costs for shippers, carriers including delays at POEs could approximate $191 million in the immediate short run (in current dollars). The disruption is considered an isolated event with no impacts to additional infrastructure. Managerial actions are suggested for resilience building and suggestions are made for future research including mitigation and a network approach to resilience in assets consistent with economic dependencies.

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