| description abstract | The past 20 years have seen significant improvements in the way regional mass evacuations are carried out in the United States. Today’s use of phased evacuation orders, contraflow, and citizen-assisted transit evacuations have come about as lessons learned from previous evacuations and have led to improvements in later ones. This paper summarizes a study to examine what may be a future step in this improvement process: the concept of flexible evacuation responses to major catastrophic hazards. Within this idea, evacuation plans would be developed in which the timing, direction of movement, and regional traffic-management plans would be changed based on the characteristics (e.g., strength, speed, movement, etc.) of a particular threat. This study was carried out using an integrated model that combines a calibrated evacuation demand model with a calibrated microscopic simulation model to evaluate a set of flexible evacuation plans for four theoretical hurricane conditions. The experimental results showed that even simple alterations to a single, static, one-size-fits-all-scenarios plan had significant benefits to the movement of traffic. In addition, such improvements could provide over $400,000 in fuel savings over the existing static plan. Whereas this research was based on evacuation from a hurricane, it is expected that similar results could be attained for evacuations from other threats. | |
