@article{ref1,
title="Dynamic traffic assignment evaluation of hurricane evacuation strategies for the Houston-Galveston, Texas, region",
journal="Transportation research record",
year="2012",
author="Songchitruksa, Praprut and Henk, Russell and Venglar, Steven and Zeng, Xiaosi",
volume="2312",
number="",
pages="108-119",
abstract="The Houston-Galveston, Texas, region has experienced several major hurricanes in recent years. During the evacuation for Hurricane Rita in 2005, the Texas Department of Transportation (DOT) decided to implement contraflow operations on I-45 to relieve massive evacuee congestion departing Houston to the north. The decision to implement contraflow was a difficult one because it involved multiple jurisdictions and required extensive coordination of manpower and resources from various entities. After the Hurricane Rita experience, the Texas DOT implemented a new strategy, referred to as &quot;evaculane,&quot; in which evacuation traffic could use the outside paved shoulder as a traveling lane when an evacuation was under way and evaculane signing beacons were activated. The objective is to increase capacity along key evacuation routes while avoiding the need for full-scale contraflow operation whenever possible. The evaculane on I-10 was successfully put into use during the Hurricane Ike evacuation in 2008. With the widening and completion of evaculanes on I-10 and US-290 as well as a partial contraflow plan for the I-45 corridor, the Texas DOT sponsored a study to develop a decision support tool to help determine whether these strategies would adequately handle the evacuation demand for various Houston-Galveston region evacuation scenarios. This paper describes the quantitative assessment of the performance of alternative evacuation strategies using a dynamic traffic assignment model, DynusT. The evaluation results indicated the evaculanes on I-10 and US-290 can sufficiently handle high evacuation demand on both routes without contraflow operation. In addition, a partial contraflow plan for I-45 was shown to provide sufficient capacity to handle high evacuation demand in lieu of full-scale contraflow operation.<p />",
language="en",
issn="0361-1981",
doi="10.3141/2312-11",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.3141/2312-11"
}