TREC | Transit Resilience for Essential Commuting

TREC is a TypeScript library. TREC has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

In the fall of 2022, Data Clinic took part in The Opportunity Project, a semi-annual sprint organized by the U.S. Census in partnership with federal agencies to demonstrate the value of open data, as part of the Building Climate Change Resilience Through Public Transit sprint sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Across our many conversations with transit officials, researchers, and community organizers from across the country about the climate-related challenges and opportunities transportation systems face, a recurring theme was the desire to enable a better understanding of climate's intersectional impact on both transit and communities. In other words, a flooded bus stop doesn't just mean that the bus and passengers can't access the stop, but it may also impede access to a hospital or community support, or to a large amount of essential jobs. How can we share that insight more effectively?. In response, we built Transit Resilience for Essential Commuting (TREC), an open source tool that allows users to efficiently assess the climate risk for transit stations within the context of the access it provides to vital services and regions. Initially focused on flooding, the most prevalent climate event facing transit officials across the country, and access to hospital and jobs, TREC allows users to explore our open data-derived, station-specific risk and access ratings, and easily filter those with the highest climate risk and highest importance for access. Our hope is that this human-centered and geospatial approach to the intersectional impact of climate change on transit and communities will give transit planners a more holistic picture to inform their infrastructure improvement decision-making. Further, we hope that making localized climate resilience tools like this open source, user-friendly, and publicly available, will empower community organizations to advocate for their underserved constituents. The climate crisis we face requires collective intelligence and creative problem solving, and democratizing access to these kinds of tools will be crucial in making progress.