Effectiveness of traffic management strategies at destination during emergency evacuation

Emergency evacuations arising from hurricane disasters in the Gulf Coast region have aroused increasing attention of transportation agencies. These emergency evacuations caused significant congestions in the disastrous area, along the evacuation routes, and at the evacuation destinations. Although most studies focus on traffic problems near the disastrous area, this study investigates effective strategies of managing traffic at the evacuation destination. This study adopts the dynamic traffic assignment based mesoscopic traffic-network planning and simulation model DYNASMART-P and applies the model to a highway network on the route of the evacuation traffic. The research investigates the effectiveness of traffic control and management strategies including intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and contra-flow operations based on an assumed scenario in which evacuation traffic from southeastern Louisiana pours into the Greater Jackson Metropolitan area of Mississippi by interstate highway I-55 NB due to an approaching hurricane disaster. The study aims to help transportation agencies in improving emergency preparedness for their highway networks to receive possible emergency evacuation traffic.