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Creators/Authors contains: "Dirks, Abbie"

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  1. Abstract Extreme weather-related events are showing how infrastructure disruptions in hinterlands can affect cities. This paper explores the risks to city infrastructure services including transportation, electricity, communication, fuel supply, water distribution, stormwater drainage, and food supply from hinterland hazards of fire, precipitation, post-fire debris flow, smoke, and flooding. There is a large and growing body of research that describes the vulnerabilities of infrastructures to climate hazards, yet this work has not systematically acknowledged the relationships and cross-governance challenges of protecting cities from remote disruptions. An evidence base is developed through a structured literature review that identifies city infrastructure vulnerabilities to hinterland hazards. Findings highlight diverse pathways from the initial hazard to the final impact on an infrastructure, demonstrating that impacts to hinterland infrastructure assets from hazards can cascade to city infrastructure. Beyond the value of describing the impact of hinterland hazards on urban infrastructure, the identified pathways can assist in informing cross-governance mitigation strategies. It may be the case that to protect cities, local governments invest in mitigating hazards in their hinterlands and supply chains. 
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  2. With work arrangements experiencing dramatic changes over the past three years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the possibility that altered work arrangements may persist well into the future, the implications of teleworking on activity-travel behavior are potentially profound. This paper aims to substantially add to the body of knowledge about the present and future of telework in the wake of the pandemic through a rigorous analysis of telework arrangements between two distinct time periods. The paper focuses on three key aspects of telework, including whether to telework or not, frequency of telework, and location of telework. Behavioral data for this study is derived from a workplace location choice survey conducted across Texas in February-March 2022, which included a recall component to obtain workplace location choice information in the pre-pandemic period. The evolution of telework arrangements between the pre-and after-pandemic periods is explored through a joint model system estimated using a joint multivariate methodology. Results show that, After COVID, the population of workers is generally inclined toward a hybrid work arrangement, with an overall tendency to engage in a higher frequency of teleworking than Before COVID. Finally, teleworkers have a higher propensity to work only from home as opposed to working only from a third workplace or from a combination of home and a third workplace. Overall, our results indicate that telework arrangements may remain at an elevated level into the future, with home serving as the dominant telework location. These findings suggest that transportation demand forecasting models need to be updated to reflect higher levels of teleworking, as well as the heterogeneity across individuals in teleworking adoption, frequency, and location. 
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  3. This paper presents an examination of the interrelationship between household vehicle ownership and ridehailing use frequency. Both variables constitute important mobility choices with significant implications for the future of transport. Although it is generally known that these two behavioral phenomena are inversely related to one another, the direction of causality is rather ambiguous. Do vehicle ownership levels affect ridehailing use frequency, or does the adoption and use of ridehailing services affect vehicle ownership? If ridehailing services affect vehicle ownership, then it is plausible that a future of mobility-as-a-service would be characterized by lower levels of vehicle ownership. To explore the degree to which these causal relationships are prevalent in the population, a joint latent segmentation model system was formulated and estimated on a survey data set collected in four automobile-oriented metropolitan areas of the United States. The latent segmentation model system recognized that the causal structures driving the mobility choices of individuals were not directly observable. Model estimation results showed that 58% of the survey sample followed the causal structure in which ridehailing use frequency affected vehicle ownership. This finding suggests that there is considerable structural heterogeneity in the population with respect to causal structures and that ridehailing use does indeed hold considerable promise to effect changes in private vehicle ownership in the future. 
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  4. This research aims to investigate the well-being implications of changes in activity-travel and time-use patterns brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study uses American Time Use Survey (ATUS) data from 2019 and 2020 to assess changes in activity-travel and time-use patterns. It applies two methods—a well-being scoring method and a time-poverty analysis method—to evaluate the impacts of these changes on society. The results show that individuals experienced diminished well-being during the pandemic even when their time-poverty statistics showed an improvement; this is because the pandemic did not allow individuals to pursue activities in a way that would enhance well-being. In general, well-being is positively associated with the pursuit of discretionary activities in the company of others in favored out-of-home locations. This explains why people have rapidly embraced traveling again in a post-pandemic era. At the same time, people desire more discretionary time (less time poverty); because the elimination of the commute contributes to this, workers are reluctant to return fully to the workplace. Planning processes need to account for a new normal in which activity-travel patterns will be increasingly shaped by the human desire to accumulate positive life experiences. 
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  5. Abstract As infrastructure confront rapidly changing environments, there is an immediate need to provide the flexibility to pivot resources and how infrastructures are prioritized. Yet infrastructures are often categorized based on static criticality framings. We describedynamic criticalityas the flexibility to reprioritize infrastructure resources during disturbances. We find that the most important prerequisite for dynamic criticality is organizational adaptive capacity characterized by flexible goals, structures, sensemaking, and strategies. Dynamic capabilities are increasingly important in the Anthropocene, where accelerating conditions, uncertainty, and growing complexity are challenging infrastructures. We review sectors that deployed dynamic management approaches amidst changing disturbances: leadership and organizational change, defense, medicine, manufacturing, and disaster response. We use an inductive thematic analysis to identify key themes and competencies and analyze capabilities that describe dynamic criticality. These competencies drive adaptive capacity and open up the flexibility to pivot what is deemed critical, depending on the particulars of the hazard. We map these competencies to infrastructure systems and describe how infrastructure organizations may build adaptive capacity toward flexible priorities. 
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