During mass evacuations, people shouldn’t have to depend on cars

Residents of Paradise, CA attempting to drive away from the Camp Fire, seen burning to the right of the road, encountered heavy traffic (photo courtesy of The New York Times)

With a wildfire closing in on their homes, residents of Paradise, CA attempted to escape the flames using their automobiles. Roads leading out of town quickly turned into parking lots.

Some trapped drivers were unable to make it out in time, burned alive in traffic. Others abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot. 

Traffic jams: an icon of American disasters

Heavy traffic fleeing the Camp Fire passes a burning automobile near Chico, CA (photo courtesy of the Chico Enterprise-Record) 

Hurricanes, firestorms, and other natural disasters pack deadly, destructive force, but they don’t change the geometry of mobility. It’s simply not possible to safely and efficiently move large numbers of people out of harm’s way via a transportation mode as space-consuming as the car. 

Thus, scenes of extreme traffic congestion have long been a symbol of large-scale disaster evacuations in America. Already facing the prospect of losing everything, people must get behind the wheel and take to overwhelmed roadways, pitted for hours against other drivers who are just as stressed as they are.

Over 100 people died during the primarily car-based evacuation of Houston prior to Hurricane Rita (photo courtesy of Houston Press) 

Normally, evacuation orders come a couple days in advance of a forecasted catastrophe. In these cases, the sudden spike in automobile travel exacerbates the usual car-related problems, such as long delays, crashes, and demand for gasoline. These problems reared their ugly head during preparations for Hurricane Rita in 2005, when over 100 people died during the primarily car-based evacuation of Houston. 

Those without access to private vehicles are left behind, told to seek help from family, friends, or a vaguely-defined “local government”. Many states and cities have failed to include any non-car options in their contingency plans for emergencies. Even plans that do mention such options often assume that only disadvantaged populations, such as elderly and disabled citizens, will utilize alternatives to the automobile.

This can have deadly consequences. For example, many of the 1,300 people who died due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 stayed behind only because they lacked viable transportation away from the storm. 

New Orleans still has a lot of room for improvement. The city cancelled an evacuation agreement with Amtrak last year even though thousands of residents rode special intercity trains to safety prior to Hurricane Gustav in 2008. The New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority’s bus system, meanwhile, still hasn’t been fully restored to 2005 levels.  

Car-based evacuations: a product of auto dependency

Residents of Orange County, CA attempt to flee the Canyon Fire in 2017. Notice the not-in-service bus stuck in the evacuation traffic (photo courtesy of CNN)

When sufficient transit is available, it can serve as a vital lifeline during emergencies, even on minimal notice. For example, Washington, DC’s Metro moved hundreds of thousands of riders out of the city center on September 11, 2001, and WMATA buses helped transport people injured at the Pentagon to hospitals. In New York, subway service was halted for over two hours following the attacks that morning due to damaged infrastructure and security concerns. But ferries arranged on the fly, as well as the decision to open bridges leading off the island to pedestrians, helped facilitate a relatively orderly evacuation of Lower Manhattan.   

But DC and New York are exceptions to the norm, as they are among the few parts of America in which multimodal options are mainstream forms of mobility. The Wikipedia article on Paradise describes the main obstacle to more efficient, multimodal evacuations in the rest of the U.S.:

“There are not many transportation options within Paradise other than driving an automobile.”

Once people believe it’s normal to have to drive everywhere, they depend on their vehicles even when it’s utterly irrational to do so. Thus, it’s no surprise that if told to evacuate, they jump in their cars on instinct, regardless of how congested or dangerous the roads are. Even if a resident of an auto-dependent place wished to evacuate using a different transportation mode, the necessary infrastructure to do so may simply not exist.   

Multimodal evacuations happen all the time – in theoretical models.

A Staten Island Ferry departs Manhattan's Whitehall Ferry Terminal on September 11, 2001 (photo courtesy of CNN)

With both natural and man-made disasters consistently omnipresent in the news, numerous researchers have developed models in their efforts to optimize the speed and efficiency of mass evacuations. Though some of this research incorporates multimodal options and acknowledges the superior efficiency these options could provide if effectively implemented, it’s not possible to fully account for all the variables of any particular disaster until it happens.

In addition to the basic infrastructural shortages inherent to auto-dependent areas, there are a number of practical challenges to developing a multimodal, high-efficiency evacuation plan. For one, transit employees can’t be put in harm’s way, and may need to be with their families and evacuate the affected area themselves.

Also, since almost all riders would be heading in the same direction, the transit provider would face an extreme version of a common challenge when moving commuters to job centers during rush hour – trains and buses would be packed in one direction, necessitating high-frequency operation, but would then have to return empty to pick up more passengers and fulfill demand. Buses would also need dedicated lanes to avoid becoming bogged down in car traffic, as even roads that don’t normally experience severe congestion may become clogged in emergencies, especially if primary highways and arterials are obstructed.

Hub and spoke models – in which local service transports evacuees to “staging points” from which longer routes provide fast connections to safe locations – may address some of these problems. For standard operations, transit providers are moving away from this model, embracing grid- or route-and-branch based approaches centered on frequent networks as they pursue bus system redesigns to keep up with shifting job centers and development patterns.

But in the unique case of a regional evacuation, temporary implementation of a well-distributed hub-and-spoke system would ensure passengers are riding in a variety of directions, to and from different hubs. Instead of buses running empty in one direction and full in the other, vehicles would originate at one hub and slowly fill as they move towards a different one. Riders would then transfer to a smaller number of very-high-frequency routes out of town, reducing the number of temporary bus lanes necessary to ensure these routes aren’t delayed by car traffic. 

As service would be oriented toward getting people away from the threatened area, all transit vehicles – and the employees operating them – would wind up in safe zones once the evacuation process is complete.

What if there’s no notice prior to a disaster?

An emergency vehicle passes abandoned cars burned during the Camp Fire (photo courtesy of The Mercury News)

A well-planned transit-based evacuation plan could work excellently – assuming there’s time to execute it. Such plans would be a strong fit for hurricanes, as preparations for such storms normally begin a few days in advance.

But all too often, disasters strike without notice. This occurred with the firestorm in Paradise, and also is typical of earthquakes, military or terrorist strikes, and tsunamis. Not only would it be incredibly challenging for a transit provider to switch from standard operation to evacuation-oriented service in an instant, but damage from the event could impede operation on major routes.

In such cases, it could be up to good Samaritans to maximize transportation efficiency on the fly and keep riders safe, as happened in New York on 9/11.  

We will never be able to eliminate the risk of an unexpected disaster. But by cutting back on our car-based travel, we can help reduce emissions-caused climate impacts, oil-motivated foreign policy decisions, and suburban sprawl-necessitated paving over of areas unfit for development – all of which have contributed to increases in the frequency and severity of these catastrophic events.