Modeling Link-level Road Traffic Resilience to Extreme Weather Events Using Crowdsourced Data

Climate changes lead to more frequent and intense weather events, posing escalating risks to road traffic. Crowdsourced data offer new opportunities to monitor and investigate changes in road traffic flow during extreme weather. This study utilizes diverse crowdsourced data from mobile devices and the community-driven navigation app, Waze, to examine the impact of three weather events (i.e., floods, winter storms, and fog) on road traffic. Three metrics, speed change, event duration, and area under the curve (AUC), are employed to assess link-level traffic change and recovery. In addition, a user's perceived severity is computed to evaluate link-level weather impact based on crowdsourced reports. This study evaluates a range of new data sources, and provides insights into the resilience of road traffic to extreme weather, which are crucial for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery in road transportation systems.