Designing transport resilience for travellers’ needs

When travel disruption strikes, travellers don’t care whether the problem sits with a power provider, airport operator, railway infrastructure, telecoms network, or software platform. They want answers to three simple questions: Can I still make my journey? What are my alternatives? Can I trust the information I’m being given?

Yet while travellers experience transport as a single service, much of transport resilience is still designed around individual assets, organisations, and modes. This is because transport systems are more than just large-scale infrastructure, they’re complex webs of organisations, owners, operators, suppliers, tech providers, and data managers. As these webs become more intricate, there’s greater risk of knock-on failures that worsen overall passenger experience, from declining service confidence, to poor passenger communications, to financial and emotional toll. Incidents such as the 2026 power outage that resulted in 544 planes being delayed at Denver International Airport, and the 2026 water outage at Gatwick Airport, highlight how failures in a single part of the transport ecosystem can quickly cascade into wider disruption, affecting passenger journeys, communications, and confidence across the network. The key question here is not why power or water failed, but whether the transport system was able to continue serving travellers when things went wrong. Recovery time still matters, but it must be measured by how quickly service resumes for travellers, rather than how fast the physical asset is fixed.

As transport systems become increasingly interconnected, the consequences of disruption will grow. Whether the cause of disruption is physical, digital, or operational, resilience will increasingly depend on how effectively organisations work together to maintain services for travellers.

Transport organisations aren’t just builders, operators, and maintainers of railways, roads, and runways. They’re service providers. Transport organisations often measure resilience through infrastructure performance. Travellers experience it very differently: through confidence, certainty and the ability to keep moving when things go wrong.

To meet these expectations, transport organisations must do more than harden individual assets. Resilience must become a core part of system design, and success must be measured by customer and journey outcomes.

Thinking must catch up with complexity

Most transport system resilience strategies remain fragmented and siloed – with road, rail, air travel, and logistics all with their own resilience policies, processes, and ways of working.

If a resilience procedure only goes as far as the specific asset it’s responsible for, it’s more likely to see failure or malfunction as a problem for itself rather than an issue that affects the journeys and experience of thousands of people across the transport network.

This approach can result in incidents that often have a deeper or longer impact than they need to because the systems are geared to recover from disruption, not absorb it. That’s why a whole system approach to resilience must start from a different premise; it’s not how quickly every asset can be restored but how effectively the transport system can continue to serve travellers while parts of it are degraded.

Operators, suppliers, telecoms providers, power networks, emergency services, tech platforms, and leadership teams must understand how they contribute to service continuity and customer experience as a collective. By building resilience into day-to-day operations, it becomes a key part of decision-making, from procurement to infrastructure design.

So how do organisations shift resilience from single infrastructure to a service-led, whole-system?

Build resilience in from the start

For a whole system approach to resilience to take hold, it needs to be designed into how systems operate instead of treating it as an add-on or afterthought. Resilience must be a foundational requirement in any new infrastructure project. For example, building resilience requirements into networks of third-party suppliers helps to make sure it’s on the agenda of every part of the ecosystem.

Our work with National Highways focused on strengthening digital resilience across the strategic road network. By moving resilience beyond an isolated technical function, they have integrated security and continuity considerations directly into day-to-day decision-making. This proactive approach supports the ongoing reliability of critical systems, ensuring that safeguarding passenger journeys is built into daily operations, rather than treated as a consideration only during active incidents.

Take stress testing systemwide

Organisations often run tests and drills to respond to incidents specific to individual needs but they’re rarely designed to handle cross-organisational scenarios. Traditional incident playbooks are no longer enough to cope with the speed of modern disruptions; instead, we need a shift toward immersive exercising that drives proactive thinking across the entire ecosystem.

Working with a UK transport client, we created a collaborative platform for staff and industry partners to test how they behave under pressure, using real-world scenarios to see how the system responded when it fails. This approach provided more insight than rehearsing standard processes in silo and helped spot gaps, particularly in the handoffs between organisations.

Adopting a collaborative platform approach to stress testing also allows organisations to practice responses to emerging tech threats and can combine cyber security drills with managing physical situations.

Stress testing must move beyond simply seeing how tech solutions hold up under pressure. The real focus should be on seeing how people behave and communicate when things go wrong. Stress testing is more than just a tech fix, it can influence cultural change too.

Make accountability clear

Technical failures become prolonged service failures when accountability, decision rights, and organisational hand-offs are unclear. This is not about creating new committees or regulators. It is about establishing shared accountability, clear decision rights, and agreed outcomes across existing organisations. This acts as a cultural building block to ensure resilience is treated as a key priority for leaders.

While working with a major UK transport system operator, we found establishing clear ownership of responsibilities when things do go wrong ensured a productive, collaborative approach to risk mitigation. By taking this approach, when an incident beyond any individual organisations control but that could still have a devastating effect on service, such as power cuts, does happen, a clear owner and path to rectification will already be mapped out so the response is swift and effective.

Disjointed thinking poses a significant risk to rectifying an incident when different players have different ideas about what they consider critical to infrastructure resilience. A network-wide resilience framework curbs this threat. Once adopted, a power cable, for example, is as critical to the power company that manages it as it is to the airport that depends on it.

A resilience framework also means everyone must work in tandem to overcome shared issues and keep the system functioning at an acceptable level.

Designing resilient systems around the traveller

Transport resilience can no longer be measured by how quickly individual assets recover but by how effectively organisations work together to keep people moving, informed, and confident when disruption occurs. This shift demands new behaviours, governance, and operational design, all built around the traveller, not the infrastructure.

Transport leaders should ask themselves a simple question: are our resilience arrangements designed to protect the assets we own, or the journeys our customers need? The organisations that act on the second answer will not prevent every disruption, but they will be far better placed to maintain trust and service continuity when the system comes under pressure.