COVID-19: Initial impacts and responses to the Pandemic from Road and Transport Agencies

During the early stages of the pandemic, the overall goal of governments was to face the public health crisis head on and suppress COVID-19 transmission. In this situation, many authorities moved to Declare a State of Emergency (Alarm) providing special powers capacity, funding or flexibility to act and take extraordinary actions to handle the unprecedented crisis. A critical aspect of these Declarations has been the ability of authorities issue interpretative orders and instructions to ensure the provision of critical or essential services for the protection of people, property and places, and maintain activity in key (essential) economic sectors. In many jurisdictions, the totality of the transportation sector was deemed essential in recognition of the critical services that it provides. It is critically important however that these Declarations are free of ambiguous language and are clear to the extend of powers granted to the various jurisdictions. For example, early on, it seemed that there was not a clear understanding by many vendors/contractors on the application of the Force Majeure of a contract. • Establish recommendations for contracts, especially for PPPs • Plan to maintain Road-Related Activity and Business Continuity • Mitigate the economic and financial consequences of reduction in traffic. ROAD WORKS • Be alert and agile o In certain cases, acceleration of some maintenance works is taking advantage of low traffic volumes, with operations adjusted according to the traffic decrease o PS great article recently about how the Louvre museum is using the lockdowns to accelerate some projects, while rooms are empty • Access adequate resources to ensure that work can be continued o Balance of adequate resources in hand versus overhead for keeping them. o Investigate the feasibility of strategic stockpiles of material that could become in short supply in the event of global disruptuion of supply chains. While certain materials are readily available locally independent of location, a lot of other material that needs to be either manufactured, i.e. structural steel, electronics equipment, asphalt, etc might be disrupted.