Resilience as an imperative in public transport organizations

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The role of public transport is to stimulate urban, social, sustainable and economicdevelopments by transport of passengers based on their needs with public transportorganizations functioning as operators in this environment. This dissertation reports onthe research done on resilience in urban public transport organizations; it presents theguiding principles and the framework of resilience and the ability of public transportorganizations to embed this capability.The emerging discipline of resilience studies is multidimensional and multidisciplinary.The phenomenon has been examined to present a holistic perspective on resiliencethrough an extensive review of the literature, supplemented by empirical research in theEuropean public transport sector. Resilience has been defined as the capacity of anorganization to survive, adapt and grow in the face of turbulent change. Existing researchtends to focus on the relevance of the concept of resilience in a diversity of environments.There is little information or research that reflects the design principles and specificsuccess factors in the public transport sector.The literature research produced several logical conclusions, which were reviewed byusing structured interviews with a selected group of specialists in this field. This made itpossible to determine guiding principles, to structure the framework, and to develop aunique classification of (i) the most fundamental vulnerability factors that make anorganization susceptible to disruptions; and (ii) the capability factors as attributesrequired for sustained performance or accomplishment.All these findings are synthesised and this research establishes the ability of publictransport organizations to implement a resilience approach within the boundaries of theirlevel of advancement and prioritised direction statements.Recommendations for further research include extending the proposed frameworkempirically to other functions and to other organizations than urban public transportorganizations.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University