In my research, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people might respond to storms, snow, or other severe weather events in a more resilient way to avoid delays, disruption, and risks to personal safety. I’ve been analysing data and searching for evidence of existing resilient responses and considering how more people might be encouraged to follow suit. However, the ‘people’ I have in mind are commuters, ordinary households, the so-called ‘general public’.

Yet at the Local Government Transport Advisory Group President’s Conference at the end of May, I was reminded of the role of a different group of people. The people who have a responsibility to the community to minimise the risk to life and property of any emergency, to react and recover from the disruption, damage, and danger that not only severe weather, but also terrorism, accidents or other unforeseen events might cause. These people include the emergency services, obviously, but they also include local government officers, people responsible for transport, energy, and digital infrastructure and services, social care and hospital staff, even the local media who help disseminate important messages and warnings.

It may not be the ‘general public’ but that’s a lot of people to coordinate. And we heard, with examples, how important it is that all these different people and services are working together in an emergency, have a ‘joint understanding of risk’ and a ‘shared situational awareness’. Without organised collaboration, mistakes are made, and in some cases, more lives are lost.

Yet resilience is not just response and recovery. It is also adaptation and preparation. And when it comes to planning for security and resilience, I learned that there are risks to sharing too much. Too much data can be open to ‘hostile reconnaissance’. Too much planning for specifics is sure to miss something or someone. Too many warnings might be a bit like the boy who cried wolf.

Rather, the advice was to plan based on generic principles. Before opening up data, consider what it can be used for and linked with. Design adaptations with dual functionality. Do have a nominated individual in every organisation responsible for understanding the interactions between physical, personnel, and cyber security and making policy decisions. Don’t have a single individual designated as the only one who can make emergency decisions.

So what does all this have to do with my research? Resilience planning is closely linked to the current debate in transport planning circles around future uncertainty in the field. Uncertainty around the role of new technologies, uncertainty around trends and forecasts, uncertainty around risks and responsibilities. There have been various proposals to replace ‘predict and provide’ with ‘scenario planning’, ‘decide and provide,’ or ‘vision and validate’, which means that the starting point should be policy and a vision of the future we all want to live in, and then we should plan for that future and evaluate whether we are achieving it on an ongoing basis.

Yet to these tidy phrases, I’d add another one I heard for the first time at the conference: ‘monitor and adapt’. If responsible professionals and researchers monitor and review what happens during various types of extreme events in different places and at different times, then we can design adaptations which offer multiple options for resilience. We can prepare and share unified messages, rather than specific data, to generate a more resilient response in the next emergency situation.

In the past, transport planners have tended to monitor what happens on ‘average’ days to plan for future certainties. Now there is a drive to consider future uncertainties, which are partly due to the internal pressures of increasing flexibility and variability in work and travel patterns, and partly due to external events that require resilience. For the latter at least, ‘monitor and adapt’ seems the best approach to take. And with such an approach, transport planners might do their part to help that list of responsible people on the front line of an emergency.