Effectiveness of the policy for organising self-evacuation by private vehicle transport, as verified in microsimulations

Abstract

The research focus was on analysing evacuation using data on the process in a selected area located within the boundaries of the Polish capital, Warsaw. The simulations were conducted to determine the consequences of private vehicle evacuation on the load of the road network, and enabled observations at the scale of the entire set of junctions, while also taking into account factor whose impact on the transport system cannot be captured by any systematic measurements (evacuation). The research procedure comprised three major stages. First, the evacuation documentation for Warsaw was reviewed. Due to the lack of detailed guidelines within the documentation, the data essential for the construction of traffic models had to be acquired (stage two), and the evacuation process was modelled in various scenarios (stage three), based on the Vissim software. The study considered five evacuation scenarios and zero variant for the two transport peaks. Thus, the total number of simulations, amounted to twelve. The results of the analysis revealed that although the deterioration of overall traffic conditions is particularly evident in Scenario 5, the evacuation process itself is still most efficient in this scenario. The traffic simulations conducted prove that it is impossible for an effective evacuation to be conducted without a disturbance to the normal traffic flow, and the ensuing accumulation may be detrimental for all road users.