Evaluation of different contraflow strategies for hurricane evacuation in Charleston, South Carolina

Abstract

Limited specific evidence is available on the effectiveness of using contraflow as an evacuation traffic management tool. This study was conducted to determine the best combination of strategy options for evacuating Charleston, SC, along route I-26 during the event of a hurricane or other events. PARAMICS microscopic traffic simulator was used to evaluate the impact of each combination of evacuee response timing and traffic control strategy, such as contraflow, with respect to average vehicular travel time and evacuation duration. Analysis revealed the combination of management strategies that created the lowest evacuation durations and travel times for several types of anticipated evacuee responses. Furthermore, a proposed reconfiguration of the I-526/I-26 interchange for contraflow operations produced additional savings in travel times and evacuation durations. These findings support the use of all lanes for contraflow during all evacuations and provide justification to examine a possible reconfiguration of the I-526/I-26 interchange for use during evacuations.

The Impact of Traffic Incident Locations on a Metropolitan Evacuation

“…Driver behavior modeling is controlled by various parameters with the capability of modeling different segments or types of roadways with multiple driver behaviors. The [26]. The researchers obtained and overlaid plans for construction projects that would be complete by the base year of 2014 because aerial images were not yet available.…”

Modeling geospatial events during flood disasters for response decision-making

“…Past work on spatiotemporal evacuation trigger buffers (Dennison et al 2007, Larsen et al 2011 and the use of volunteered geographic information (Pultar et al 2010) have been shown to effectively model the safe evacuation of people from wildfires. Research in transportation networks and how they can be optimized to evacuated citizens from hurricanes has also proven successful at simulating the movement of people away from the hurricane's impacts (Naghawi and Wolshon 2010, Wang et al 2010, Fries et al 2011. The model in this paper extends this work by including the evacuations of building contents rather than the evacuations of people.…”

“…Evacuations help to protect the lives of citizens who are at risk during a disaster. An extensive literature has investigated the spatiotemporal simulation of evacuating people from fires (Cova et al 2005, Dennison et al 2007, Larsen et al 2011, Shenhar et al 2012, hurricanes (Chen et al 2006, Chiu et al 2008, Naghawi and Wolshon 2010, Wang et al 2010, Fries et al 2011, and floods Ahmad 2005, Kim et al 2011). Two spatial decision support systems (SDSS) exist that aid in estimating evacuations during disasters such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes (HURREVAC, http://www.hurrevac.com/ and Hazus-MH, http://www.fema.gov/hazus).…”

“…For communities and individuals faced with the possibility of being flooded, risk perception is a function of the location and spatial variation of risk (Siebeneck and Cova 2012). Work on evacuations for hurricanes (involving coastal flooding and hurricane winds) have examined the ability for transportation networks to handle the traffic volumes during an evacuation (Naghawi and Wolshon 2010, Wang et al 2010, Fries et al 2011. Similar work has examined the ability for transportation networks to support evacuations from fires as well (Cova and Johnson 2002).…”