Evacuation in Zone A: An Examination of Public Transit’s Role During a Natural Disaster

Since 2005, hurricanes have lean to issues regarding evacuating large population who are transit dependent from urban area roadways and public transportation systems. Over the years evacuation models have been used to evaluate evacuation time, an estimate of how many people can be evacuated in x number of days, and finding alternative routes. History has proven that in case of an emergency, citizens do not know what needs to- be done to- evacuate securely, timely and safely. Evacuation modeling helps planners to determine how long it will take to evacuate, identifying critical locations in the transportation network, assessing traffic operations and strategies and 1 2 acknowledging-transit dependent individuals or populations. Much has to be taken into consideration when planning for evacuations such as unemployment, low income housing, shelters scheduling, elderly, disability, transit dependent populations. To be able to- move a large number of people out of harm\u27s way during a natural disaster with the implementation of Transit using GIS to create the transit network and then running it in TRANSIMS will help calculate the evacuation time and planning strategies based on the simulation. Due to failed attempt to- run the simulation smoothly, the results- will be on the bases of a controlled condition using New Orleans as base. The two-tailed hypothesis using the number of buses New Orleans City. The evacuation model TRANSIMS formed the baselines evaluate how many buses will be needed to- evacuate Galveston Is-land with an estimate of how many can be evacuated off the island