December 2021 Newsletter
Dear HVTT subscriber, On December 20, 2021, the Coquihalla Highway in southwest British Columbia re-opened to essential commercial traffic after major storms and flooding caused extensive damage and forced its closure on November 14, 2021. Those storms also severely impacted other land-based transportation routes (road and rail) to/from the city of Vancouver, effectively cutting it off from the rest of Canada. This recent event highlights the importance of building resilient road freight transport systems, which is the theme of this month’s HVTT newsletter. What does resilience mean? In general terms, resilience refers to the ability to recover quickly from difficulties. In material science, we often consider resilience as the ability of a material to absorb energy, deform elastically, and then return to the original form upon unloading. This idea of “bouncing back” is useful when considering the functionality of a road freight transport system. Consider a system operating at full... Read More