Abstract
Previous efforts to quantify and estimate the effect of seismic disruptions on the performance of the transportation network have relied on traditional trip-based static traffic assignment methods to estimate and compare network flows under base and damaged cases. Such static assignments with the well-known problem of unrealistically high volume/capacity ratios on congested links, are questionable for predicting the post-earthquake peak-period travel times when links are disabled. This paper introduces the use of mesoscopic traffic simulation in a seismic risk analysis (SRA) framework. This study assesses seismic risk in terms of potential travel time increases in a study area incorporating the site of the Downtown Los Angeles bridge failures during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. This study successfully obtained system risk curves of network-wide travel time increases, and also took advantage of vehicle trajectory output to obtain risk curves of travel time increases for specific origin-destination (OD) pairs.