How to Evacuate: Model for Understanding the Routing Strategies during Hurricane Evacuation
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 140, Issue 1
Abstract
This paper explains a modeling approach that offers better understanding of the routing strategies taken by evacuees to reach a safe destination during hurricane evacuation. Route choice during evacuation is a complex process because evacuees may prefer to take the usual or familiar route on the way to the destination, or they might follow the routes recommended by the emergency officials. Depending on the condition of the traffic stream, sometimes they might switch to a different route to obtain better travel time from the one initially attempted, i.e., the routing behavior is random. By using data from Hurricane Ivan, a mixed (random parameters) logit model is estimated which captures the decision making process on what type of route to select while accounting for the existence of unobserved heterogeneity across households. Estimation findings indicate that the choices of evacuation routing strategy involve a complex interaction of variables related to household location, evacuation characteristics, and socioeconomic characteristics. The findings of this study are useful to determine the manner in which different factions of people select a type of route for a given sociodemographic profile during an evacuation.
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Acknowledgments
This research presented in this paper was supported by National Science Foundation Award SES-0826874 and SES-0826873 “Incorporating Household Decision Making and Dynamic Transportation Modeling in Hurricane Evacuation: An Integrated Social Science-Engineering Approach,” for which the authors are grateful. The Ivan survey was supported by the USACE and directed by Betty Morrow and Hugh Gladwin. The writers also acknowledge Prof. Fred Mannering of Purdue University for his valuable suggestions on estimating the mixed-logit model. However, the authors are solely responsible for the findings of the research work.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 140 • Issue 1 • January 2014
Pages: 61 - 69
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 3, 2012
Accepted: Aug 19, 2013
Published online: Aug 21, 2013
Published in print: Jan 1, 2014
Discussion open until: Jan 21, 2014
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