Application of TRANSIMS for the Multimodal Microscale Simulation of the New Orleans Emergency Evacuation Plan

Abstract

Following the obvious failings to effectively evacuate the low-mobility populations from New Orleans for Hurricane Katrina, state and local officials in Louisiana as well as their federal counterparts, developed a revised evacuation plan for the region that includes a much greater usage of public transit resources. The 2006 post-Katrina New Orleans City Assisted Evacuation Plan relies on busses, trains, and even airplanes to ferry out elderly, infirm, tourists, and economically disadvantaged residents of the city using a complex relay system that spans between various modes and locations. Although officials are confident that the new plan will eliminate much of the delays and suffering experienced by these low-mobility individuals, at the time of this research and development project the plan was not yet complete and had never been tested or evaluated to any degree. The city assisted evacuation plan for New Orleans is one of the cornerstones of the city's emergency preparedness position to assist the elderly, sick, and poor. However, it had never been used, practiced, or even simulated and no one knew how well or even if it will actually work. In this project the Transportation Analysis and Simulation System (TRANSIMS) was applied for emergency transportation planning and analysis. In this effort, the TRANSIMS platform was used to develop a transportation model to simulate the travel processes associated with an evacuation of the New Orleans Louisiana metropolitan region. Given the temporal and spatial scales of mass evacuations, it was theorized that the scalability and level of detail afforded by the TRANSIMS program would make it an ideal system to model, test, and evaluate evacuation and other emergency transportation plans.