Traffic Signal Timing for Urban Evacuation
Publication: Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 133, Issue 1
Abstract
Numerous works have considered methods for improving traffic conditions, and hence reducing evacuation time, in a geographic evacuation. The majority of these efforts have focused on traffic flow along freeways, and it appears that there has been no systematic consideration of signal timing in evacuation planning for urban areas. However, traffic signals can have tremendous impact on the movement of urban populations in an evacuation. In this paper, approaches for signal timing to facilitate evacuation and response in the event of a no-advance-notice disaster requiring evacuation in an urban area are investigated using a simulation model constructed with data from Washington, D.C. The trade-offs between evacuation time and average delay are studied in assessing proposed timing plans.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Federal Highway Administration (FHwA) Office of Operations as part of its Emergency Transportation Operations Program. We are grateful to Rachel Klein and David Suchinsky for their assistance with the simulation runs and to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for support of their work through the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program under Grant No. CMS 0348552. This support from the FHwA and NSF is gratefully acknowledged, but implies no endorsement of the findings. In addition, we are most grateful to the District Department of Transportation for providing data that were critical to this study and to Phil Tarnoff of the University of Maryland whose idea it was to work on this research activity and without whom this study would not have been supported.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 133 • Issue 1 • March 2007
Pages: 30 - 42
Copyright
© 2007 ASCE.
History
Received: Aug 1, 2005
Accepted: Aug 22, 2006
Published online: Mar 1, 2007
Published in print: Mar 2007
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