Access to critical and essential services (CES) is vital for community resilience, particularly in coastal areas facing natural hazards. We developed a novel transportation network analysis framework to assess access fragility (in terms of losing access), criticality (in terms of the importance of CES facilities), and equity of CES access across five Louisiana communities. We used drive time to the closest facility, marginal drive time to the second closest facility, and the number of alternatives within critical time thresholds as three measures for fragility analysis. Our findings show that fragility is not limited to rural areas—urban communities experiencing in-migration also face risks due to limited alternatives. Removing one facility at a time revealed that it can cause up to a 500% increase in drive times to dialysis centers and hospitals for residents of Morgan City and Stephensville, while, on average, removing one random high school results in a 6%–30% increase in drive time across communities. We also introduced a criticality ranking method using total population, percentage of the population without an alternative, and marginal drive time for populations without alternatives, and calculated rank stability across different weightings of these three measures to identify facilities that are consistently most critical. Cameron Parish had the highest concentration of critical facilities, though facilities in Slidell and Mandeville also ranked highly, highlighting potential capacity concerns for two communities with growing populations. Finally, our equity analysis, performed using Monte Carlo simulations, shows that Native populations are disproportionately affected by limited access to services (∼29% are identified as outliers for dialysis and hospital access), while White populations experience the lowest average drive times to most CES facilities.

Read original article

Read original article