Incident Occurrence Modeling during Hurricane Evacuation Events: The Case of Alabama's I-65 Corridor

Daniel J Fonseca,Saravanan Gurupackiam,Gary P Moynihan,Yingyan Lou

doi:10.1155/2013/168126

Abstract

Contraflow on major evacuation routes is one scheme that has been adopted in many Gulf and eastern coastal states for hurricane evacuation. The idea is to reverse one direction of the roadway in order to accommodate the often substantially increased travel demand moving away from the impact area. Efficient planning and operation is critical to a successful contraflow implementation. Alabama has an approximately 140-mile contraflow segment on I-65 between exit 31 and exit 167 and has carried out contraflow operations several times in past hurricane evacuations. The timing for the deployment of equipment and personnel and the initiation and termination of actual contraflow affects the effectiveness, safety, and cost of the operation. Researchers from the University of Alabama were tasked with the design of a decision support system for contraflow evacuation planning. The conceived decision support system consists of three main modules: the demand module, the network optimization module, and the incident and characterization module. This paper focuses on the design of the traffic incident generation and characterization module of the planned decision support system.

Highlights

Massive evacuations due to tropical storms, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events are becoming routine events in coastal regions around the globe
Lindell and Prater [3] conducted a study that lists the principal behavioral factors affecting hurricane evacuation time estimates (ETEs). Among these factors, the authors mention the impact that traffic incidents originated from hazardous conditions such as storm surge and wind has on evacuees’ travel times and route selections; accessing the role of incidents in hurricane evacuations was outside the scope of their investigation
It is assumed that 70.5% of all disabled and abandoned vehicles will be resolved within 15 minutes of their occurrence and 18.4% of such events will take between 15 and 30 minutes to clear, while the remaining 11.2% may take somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes. These incident durations as well as the estimated road capacity reductions shown in Table 2 were established after a comprehensive study that involved detailed analysis of Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT)’s hurricane evacuation logs, as well as adaptation of the approaches followed by Qin and Smith [9], Zou et al [5], and Robinson et al [7] originated from the Highway Capacity Manual [8]

Summary

Introduction

Massive evacuations due to tropical storms, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events are becoming routine events in coastal regions around the globe. Normal traffic flows turn into congestion, frustration, and gridlock This reduces the number of vehicles that can leave the affected area if an evacuation order is given. Among the most common evacuation strategies flowed by traffic management officials during such events is “reverselaning” or “contraflow.” Contraflow is the process of reversing one direction of traffic on specific routes to facilitate overall evacuation flow. This procedure is generally applicable to interstates, referred to as “denied access routes,” since traffic control can be applied to interchanges and terminal areas. This paper discusses the development and validation of the incident generation and characterization module

Background

Incident Generation and Characterization during Hurricane Evacuation

Implementation

Findings

Conclusion and Remarks