Citation

Songchitruksa P, Henk R, Venglar S, Zeng X. Transp. Res. Rec. 2012; 2312: 108-119.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences USA, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.3141/2312-11

PMID

unavailable

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 "evaculane," 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.