title: Traffic evacuation time under nonhomogeneous conditions.
abstract: During many manmade and natural crises such as terrorist threats, floods, hazardous chemical and gas leaks, emergency personnel need to estimate the time in which people can evacuate from the affected urban area. Knowing an estimated evacuation time for a given crisis, emergency personnel can plan and prepare accordingly with the understanding that the actual evacuation time will take longer. Given the urban area to be evacuated, street widths exiting the area's perimeter, the area's population density, average vehicle occupancy, transport mode share and crawl speed, an estimation of traffic evacuation time can be derived. Peak-hour traffic data collected at three, midblock, Mumbai sites of varying geometric features and traffic composition were used in calibrating a model that estimates peak-hour traffic flow rates. Model validation revealed a correlation coefficient of +0.98 between observed and predicted peak-hour flow rates. A methodology is developed that estimates traffic evacuation time using the model.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Civil Engineering , Indian Institute of Technology Bombay , Powai , Mumbai , India.
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fazio
authors.affiliation: b Transportation Systems Engineering , Indian Institute of Technology Bombay , Powai , Mumbai , India.
authors.forename: Rohan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Shetkar
authors.affiliation: a Department of Civil Engineering , Indian Institute of Technology Bombay , Powai , Mumbai , India.
authors.forename: Tom V
authors.initials: TV
authors.lastname: Mathew
mesh_terms: D001334:Automobile Driving; D004190:Disasters; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D013997:Time Factors; D014505:Urban Population
keywords: evacuation; nonhomogeneous; street; time; traffic; urban