Citation

Alam MDJ, Habib MA, Quigley K, Webster TL. Transp. Res. Rec. 2018; 2672(1): 148-160.

Affiliation

Department of Civil and Resource Engineering, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada 2School of Planning, and Department of Civil and Resource Engineering, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada 3School of Public Administration, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada 4Applied Geomatics Research Group, Nova Scotia Community College, Lawrencetown, NS, Canada Corresponding Author: Address correspondence to Muhammad Ahsanul Habib: ahsan.habib@dal.ca

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Transportation Research Board, National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences USA, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0361198118799169

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of traffic impacts of a mass evacuation of the Halifax Peninsula under several flooding scenarios. Flood extent and associated damages to the transport network are identified through digital elevation modeling that intersects with the Halifax stream and transport networks. The resulting flood scenarios inform a traffic microsimulation model that uses a dynamic traffic assignment-based microsimulation approach and simulates the evacuation of 34,808 evacuees estimated from the Halifax Regional Transport Network Model. The simulation results suggest that flooding of the links by 7.9 m flood reduces alternative evacuation routes by 31.2%. It takes 15 hours to evacuate 83% of evacuees while the remaining 17% are not accommodated in the network due to reduced network capacity. The number of vehicles in the network has peaked at 13,000 in this flooding scenario. An evaluation of network performance reveals a sustained congestion prevailing from 4th to 7th hour of the evacuation. The novelty of this study is that it develops a comprehensive tool of flood risk and dynamic traffic microsimulation modeling to offer an in-depth evaluation of potential impacts during evacuation. The results will help emergency professionals in evacuation planning and making emergency decisions.

Language: en