Emergency evacuation study for the Greater Jackson Area : evacuation traffic from New Orleans.

In response to both natural and man-made disasters, more and more emergency evacuation plans have been put forward and consistently aim to move a large disaster-affected population through a highway networks towards safer areas as quickly and efficiently as possible. The objectives of this study are 1) to verify the feasibility of applying the DYNASMART-P model to simulations of traffic characteristics in both normal and emergency conditions for the urban transportation system in the Greater Jackson metropolitan area in Mississippi and 2) to evaluate the effects of possible traffic management strategies on a large scale evacuation of people under emergency conditions on highway networks in the Greater Jackson area. In this report, traffic networks of the tri-county area including Hinds, Madison and Rankin were built through the mesoscopic traffic-network planning and simulation program DYNASMART-P based on the dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) model, and applied the model to a highway network on the routes of the evacuation. The OD demand as input for the simulation program was calibrated using observed traffic volume data collected in several critical routes of evacuation. The evacuation scenario of evacuation traffic from New Orleans was designed to study the impacts of the evacuation traffic to the Greater Jackson metropolitan area of Mississippi due to an assumed approaching hurricane disaster. Four traffic management strategies, including no strategy (NS), intelligent transportation systems (IS), contraflow (CS), and contraflow plus (ICS) were tested for their effectiveness in reducing congestion. Critically congested freeway segments under different evacuation intensity levels were identified based on the criteria of the average queue length percentage, speed and delay. The causes for congested locations of the network were identified and analyzed.