NCHRP Report 777: A Guide to Regional Transportation Planning for Disasters, Emergencies, and Significant Events helps transportation stakeholders in the public and private sectors, as well as non-transportation stakeholders, such as emergency managers and first responders, better understand transportation’s important role in planning for multijurisdictional disasters, emergencies, and major events. The guide sets out foundational planning principles and uses examples, case studies, tips, tools, and suggested strategies to illustrate their implementation. The research (literature review, survey, and interviews) discovered multijurisdictional transportation planning for disasters, emergencies, and significant events taking place in many locations across the country, in many different institutional frameworks. Such planning shares precepts of communication and collaboration, supported by eight basic principles that enable communities to better recover after a major disruption. Effective planning is comprehensive, cooperative, informative, coordinated, inclusive, exercised, flexible, and continuous. These principles connect the many disciplines, levels of government, and private, non-profit, and public-sector agencies that contribute to a good community plan. They provide a shared vocabulary for a collaborative effort that promises sound preparation, effective response, and rapid recovery. The Louis Berger Group led a team that prepared NCHRP Report 777under NCHRP Project 20-59(42). They were tasked to develop a guide with principles and resources for facilitating regional transportation planning, coordination, and operations across all modes for disasters, emergencies, and significant events. Four key components comprise the research that led to the guide: a literature review; a national survey; follow-up telephone interviews with key stakeholders who had first-hand experience and knowledge of planning for disasters, emergencies, and significant events; and two webinars to review the draft guide, one with the study panel and one with key stakeholders. The research discovered multijurisdictional transportation planning for disasters, emergencies, and significant events crossing the thresholds between long range emergency mitigation planning, land use planning and transportation planning, as well as tactical emergency and transportation operations planning, in diverse planning and operations organizations as well as non-profit agencies. The guide’s examples and case studies focus on the positive applications of the principles of multijurisdictional transportation planning for disasters, emergencies, and significant events, including lessons observed, rather than emphasizing failures in planning. In addition to the guide, a research report and a PowerPoint presentation describing the entire project can be accessed on the TRB website at http://www.trb.org by searching for “NCHRP Report 777”. (Author/publisher)
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