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Hurricanes are costly natural disasters periodically faced by households in coastal and, to some extent, inland areas. Public agencies must understand household behavior to develop evacuation plans that align with evacuee choices and behavior. This paper presents a previously unknown household-level hurricane evacuation destination type choice model. The discrete choice of destination type is modeled using a nested logit model. Although previous literature considers only houses of friends and relatives and hotels for modeling purposes, this paper incorporates public shelters, churches, and an aggregated destination type denoted other. This research found that the variables influencing this choice include hurricane position at evacuation time, household geographic location, race, income, preparation time, changes in evacuation plans, previous experiences with major hurricanes, household members working during the evacuation, and evacuation notices. The findings of this paper are useful to understand the competition among destination types and how the characteristics of the demand can be used to develop evacuation strategies, such as increasing and/or decreasing use of public shelters, and measuring the effect of evacuation notices in areas with high accessibility to hotels.

Inferences on hurricane evacuation behavior are usually drawn through developing empirical models. These models are estimated using data that are specific to a given hurricane context. One important issue, therefore, is whether such models are applicable to different hurricane contexts. This paper investigates this transferability issue of evacuation choice models across different hurricanes. Initially, we estimate three separate models of the binary decision to evacuate or not, using data sets from three hurricanes (Andrew, Ivan, and Katrina) that occurred at different periods. Then a joint model is estimated combining these three evacuation data sources. When estimating the model jointly, the differences among the scale parameters of the data sets are specifically accounted for. The results from joint and separate models are then statistically tested to evaluate whether evacuation decision model parameters are transferable across different hurricane contexts. The result from the statistical test suggests that the parameters of the evacuation choice models are transferable over different hurricane contexts in similar regions, an important implication for policymakers and emergency preparedness agencies.

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