The very high travel demands associated with hurricane evacuations require some strategies, such as contraflow sections, to be included in hurricane evacuation plans. However, the response or reaction of the evacuees to these strategies has not been given much attention in the past. This study concentrated on one particular strategy, contraflow segments, and investigated evacuees' willingness to use them through an animated survey. Usable data was collected from 821 respondents. The first part of the study dealt with six factors (service availability, police presence, exit location, entry congestion, availability of multiple entries, and limited choice) which were studied independently and compared against individual background characteristics. The distribution of the responses from the survey indicated that the presence of multiple entries or the availability of information about services increased the likelihood of evacuees switching to contraflow lanes, while the presence of police personnel for instance did not greatly alter the decision. Other factors like entry congestion or exits well before or well after initially desired ones decreased the willingness to use contraflow lanes. In the case where contraflow lanes were the only option on the main evacuation route (without the regular lane alternative), evacuees were willing to take detours to avoid the use of contraflow facilities. However, the effects of the above listed factors were associated with the background characteristics of the evacuees as the odds ratios in this study indicated. Previous contraflow or reverse lane experience for instance attenuated the effect of entry congestion on avoiding contraflow lanes. Contraflow experience on the other hand increased the likelihood of using the first entry when two entries were available and increased the willingness to switch to contraflow lanes when information about services was provided. Also, evacuation experience, presence of passengers affecting stops, and having dependents in the family improved the willingness to use contraflow lanes given information about services. Other characteristics like living in a hurricane prone area increased the inclination to use contraflow in the presence of police personnel and having passengers affecting destination choice increased the willingness to detour and avoid contraflow when regular lanes were not part of the main evacuation route from the respondent's origin. The second part of the study dealt with congestion and information about congestion levels along the regular and contraflow lanes. Different combinations of levels of congestion and information were presented to the respondents in the animated part of the survey. Respondents indicated their preference for contraflow or regular lanes in these scenarios. This data was used to develop a conditional logit model which predicted choice based on the presented options. Evacuees demonstrated an overall willingness to switch to contraflow lanes when these lanes were less congested than the regular lanes. However, with similar congestion levels on the regular and contraflow lanes, willingness to switch to contraflow lanes decreased as congestion levels increased. Information about upcoming congestion influenced evacuees' route choice decisions. Information motivated switching to contraflow lanes when conveying better downstream conditions along these lanes. Overall, evacuees demonstrated a willingness to benefit from any congestion improvement offered by contraflow lanes as opposed to assumptions in the literature claiming underutilization of these segments due to drivers' discomfort and unfamiliarity. / Master of Science

In recent years, natural, man-made and technological disasters have been increasing in magnitude and frequency of occurrence. Terrorist attacks have increased after the September 11, 2001. Some authorities suggest that global warming is partly the blame for the increase in frequency of natural disasters, such as the series of hurricanes in the early-2000's. Furthermore, there has been noticeable growth in population within many metropolitan areas not only in the US but also worldwide. These and other facts motivate the need for better emergency evacuation route planning (EERP) approaches in order to minimize the loss of human lives and property. This research considers aspects of evacuation routing never before considered in research and, more importantly, in practice. Previous EERP models only either consider unidirectional evacuee flow from the source of a hazard to destinations of safety or unidirectional emergency first responder flow to the hazard source. However, in real-life emergency situations, these heterogeneous, incompatible flows occur simultaneously over a bi-directional capacitated lane-based travel network, especially in unanticipated emergencies. By incompatible, it is meant that the two different flows cannot occupy a given lane and merge or crossing point in the travel network at the same time. In addition, in large-scale evacuations, travel lane normal flow directions can be reversed dynamically to their contraflow directions depending upon the degree of the emergency. These characteristics provide the basis for this investigation. This research considers the multiple flow EERP problem where the network travel lanes can be reconfigured using contraflow lane reversals. The first flow is vehicular flow of evacuees from the source of a hazard to destinations of safety, and the second flow is the emergency first responders to the hazard source. After presenting a review of the work related to the multiple flow EERP problem, mathematical formulations are proposed for three variations of the EERP problem where the objective for each problem is to identify an evacuation plan (i.e., a flow schedule and network contraflow lane configuration) that minimizes network clearance time. Before the proposed formulations, the evacuation problem that considers only the flow of evacuees out of the network, which is viewed as a maximum flow problem, is formulated as an integer linear program. Then, the first proposed model formulation, which addresses the problem that considers the flow of evacuees under contraflow conditions, is presented. Next, the proposed formulation is expanded to consider the flow of evacuees and responders through the network but under normal flow conditions. Lastly, the two-flow problem of evacuees and responders under contraflow conditions is formulated. Using real-world population and travel network data, the EERP problems are each solved to optimality; however, the time required to solve the problems increases exponentially as the problem grows in size and complexity. Due to the intractable nature of the problems as the size of the network increases, a genetic-based heuristic solution procedure that generates evacuation network configurations of reasonable quality is proposed. The proposed heuristic solution approach generates evacuation plans in the order of minutes, which is desirable in emergency situations and needed to allow for immediate evacuation routing plan dissemination and implementation in the targeted areas.

Recent natural disasters have highlighted the need to evacuate people as quickly as possible. During hurricane Rita in 2005, people were stuck in queue buildups and large scale congestions, due to improper use of capacity, planning and inadequate response to vehicle breakdown, flooding and accidents. Every minute is precious in situation of such disaster scenarios. Understanding evacuation demand loading is an essential part of any evacuation planning. One of the factors often understood to effect evacuation, but not modeled has been the effect of a previous hurricane. This has also been termed as the 'Katrina Effect', where, due to the devastation caused by hurricane Katrina, large number of people decided to evacuate during Hurricane Rita, which hit Texas three weeks after Katrina hit Louisiana. An important aspect influencing the rate of evacuation loading is Evacuation Preparation Time also referred to as 'Mobilization time' in literature. A methodology to model the effect of a recent past hurricane on the mobilization times for evacuees in an evacuation has been presented utilizing simultaneous estimation techniques. The errors for the two simultaneously estimated models were significantly correlated, confirming the idea that a previous hurricane does significantly affect evacuation during a subsequent hurricane. The results show that the home ownership, number of individuals in the household, income levels, and level/risk of surge were significant in the model explaining the mobilization times for the households. Pet ownership and number of kids in the households, known to increase the mobilization times during isolated hurricanes, were not found to be significant in the model. Evacuation operations are marred by unexpected blockages, breakdown of vehicles and sudden flooding of transportation infrastructure. A fast and accurate simulation model to incorporate flexibility into the evacuation planning procedure is required to react to such situations. Presently evacuation guidelines are prepared by the local emergency management, by testing various scenarios utilizing micro-simulation, which is extremely time consuming and do not provide flexibility to evacuation plans. To gain computational speed there is a need to move away from the level of detail of a micro-simulation to more aggregated simulation models. The Cell Transmission Model which is a mesoscopic simulation model is considered, and compared with VISSIM a microscopic simulation model. It was observed that the Cell Transmission Model was significantly faster compared to VISSIM, and was found to be accurate. The Cell Transmission model has a nice linear structure, which is utilized to construct Linear Programming Problems to determine optimal strategies. Optimization models were developed to determine strategies for optimal scheduling of evacuation orders and optimal crossover locations for contraflow operations on freeways. A new strategy termed as 'Dynamic Crossovers Strategy' is proposed to alleviate congestion due to lane blockages (due to vehicle breakdowns, incidents etc.). This research finds that the strategy of implementing dynamic crossovers in the event of lane blockages does improve evacuation operations. The optimization model provides a framework within which optimal strategies are determined quickly, without the need to test multiple scenarios using simulation. Destination networks are the cause of the main bottlenecks for evacuation routes, such aspects of transportation networks are rarely studied as part of evacuation operations. This research studies destination networks from a macroscopic perspective. Various relationships between network level macroscopic variables (Average Flow, Average Density and Average speed) over the network were studied. Utilizing these relationships, a "Network Breathing Strategy" was proposed to improve dissipation of evacuating traffic into the destination networks. The network breathing strategy is a cyclic process of allowing vehicles to enter the network till the network reaches congestion, which is followed by closure of their entry into the network until the network reaches an acceptable state. After which entrance into the network is allowed again. The intuitive motivation behind this methodology is to ensure that the network does not remain in congested conditions. The term 'Network Breathing' was coined due to the analogy seen between this strategy to the process of breathing, where vehicles are inhaled by the network (vehicles allowed in) and dissipated by the network (vehicles are not allowed in). It is shown that the network breathing improves the dissipation of vehicle into the destination network. Evacuation operations can be divided into three main levels: at the origin (region at risk), routes and destination. This research encompasses all the three aspects and proposes a framework to assess the whole system in its entirety. At the Origin the demand dictates when to schedule evacuation orders, it also dictates the capacity required on different routes. These breakthroughs will provide a framework for a real time Decision Support System which will help emergency management official make decisions faster and on the fly.

Värmdö is a commuter municipality to Stockholm. Road 222 between Värmdö and Stockholm is the main commuter route for both bus and car traffic. Road 222 is a bottleneck at Farstabron in the direction towards Värmdö, where the motorway will go from two to one lane and become a non-meeting motorway. Towards Stockholm, the bridge has two lanes, which is why capacity is not affected as strongly in that direction. The accessibility problems arise mainly in the direction of Värmdö during maximum hours in the afternoon and during weekends and summer time as the municipality also has many holiday homes. Measures to improve accessibility have been raised by both the municipality and the Swedish Transport Administration. Building a new bridge is not relevant as the remaining expected technical life of the bridge is long. The Swedish Transport Administration has an idea for a reversible lane solution on the bridge, which is the proposal studied in this thesis. Data collection and traffic analysis has been performed to study how the travel time effect would be if Farstabron was rebuilt into a reversible 2 + 1 road, with or without a reversible bus lane. The tool used is the microsimulation program PTV VISSIM. The results show that a reversible solution without a bus lane is the alternative that provides by far the largest travel time gains for both car and bus in 2040. The degree project contains a chapter that deals with traffic engineering theory and traffic simulation theory as well as a literature study chapter that summarizes the knowledge about reversible lanes. The information about reversible lanes, even international studies, is poor.Experiences of reversible lanes is good and is mainly to be recommended as the flow in one direction is significantly greater than in the other. The traffic safety risk is primarily linked to unprotected road users. The most common internationally according to what has been identified is to implement reversible lanes on motorways with protective barriers. However, no reversible lane without a barrier have been identified holding 80km/h. Studies have shown that reversible lanes could have a cost-benefit ratio of around 7, which means that the benefit outweighed the costs 7 times in money measured. The weaving dynamics of VISSIM from two to one lane were challenging to calibrate against the reality. Preparatory behavior during lane changes is mainly affected by car-following and lane-changing models in VISSIM. In the simulation the correlation with collected data was slightly more accurate with the car following model for W99 (freeway) rather than W74 (weaving urban rd).