In September 2005, the threat of Hurricane Rita to the Houston-Galveston region resulted in the evacuation of more than one million persons from the Texas coastal and urban areas. This concentration of evacuees overloaded all routes leaving the Houston area, resulting in traffic queues on freeways as long as 36-hours. While traffic and emergency management personnel had access to real-time traffic information in the urban areas, no such information was available in rural areas where the roadways had restricted capacity. There was clearly a need to expand video and traffic monitoring capabilities beyond the urban areas to allow for better traffic management in response to evacuations as well as normal traffic operations. HURREVAC is a restricted-use Internet based computer program used by government emergency managers to track hurricanes and assist in evacuation-related decision making. The program includes an ETIS (Environment Transport Integrated planning System) module included which allows for inclusion and access to real-time traffic information by emergency managers. This report documents attempts to complete the integration of the module with traffic data for Texas coastal regions. It also provides for general equipment and installation guidelines for deployment of video and sensor detection stations along hurricane evacuation routes. In addition, a list of recommended additional deployments of such monitoring equipment to allow for improved monitoring and managing of traffic during evacuation events in Texas.

Large-Scale Evacuation introduces the reader to the steps involved in evacuation modelling for towns and cities, from understanding the hazards that can require large-scale evacuations, through understanding how local officials decide to issue evacuation advisories and households decide whether to comply, to transportation simulation and traffic management strategies. The author team has been recognized internationally for their research and consulting experience in the field of evacuations. Collectively, they have 125 years of experience in evacuation, including more than 140 projects for federal and state agencies. The text explains how to model evacuations that use the road transportation network by combining perspectives from social scientists and transportation engineers, fields that have commonly approached evacuation modelling from distinctly different perspectives. In doing so, it offers a step-by-step guide through the key questions needed to model an evacuation and its impacts to the evacuation route system as well as evacuation management strategies for influencing demand and expanding capacity. The authors also demonstrate how to simulate the resulting traffic and evacuation management strategies that can be used to facilitate evacuee movement and reduce unnecessary demand. Case studies, which identify key points to analyze in an evacuation plan, discuss evacuation termination and re-entry, and highlight challenges that someone developing an evacuation plan or model should expect, are also included. This textbook will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and advanced students.

Disasters like floods, hurricanes, chemical or nuclear accidents may cause the necessity to evacuate the affected area. The evacuation of the urban area needs to be planned carefully. One issue is the reorganization of the traffic routing. Congested urban areas have usually complex street networks that are composed of many intersections with streets connecting them. The population density of a congested urban area is usually high and the street network is already used to capacity during rush hour traffic. The considered problem of this work is the reorganization of the traffic routing of an urban area for the case of an emergency mass evacuation. Especially aspects of the evacuation like safety, avoidance of delays and the total system travel time are taken into account. Combinatorial and graph theoretical aspects are adapted for the evacuation problem and highlight issues concerning especially conflicts within intersections. This work gives an extensive summary of literature of evacuation of urban areas. Mixed-integer linear programming models are developed for evacuation problems and heuristic algorithms are provided and tested.?

With AI advancements eliciting imminent changes to our transport systems, this enlightening Handbook presents essential research on this evolution of the transportation sector. It focuses on not only urban planning, but relevant themes in law and ethics to form a unified resource on the practicality of AI use.