Emergency evacuation of major cities has taken on new prominence following hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The congressional request for this study, however, stems from the consequences of 9/11 and the critical role that transit played that day in evacuating lower Manhattan following the attack on the World Trade Center and in providing emergency assistance. Timely decision making by transit operators and rapid evacuation of transit facilities in the immediate vicinity of the World Trade Center avoided any casualties to transit riders as a result of the collapse of the two towers. Hundreds of thousands of people were safely evacuated from lower Manhattan after tunnels were deemed safe for operation. Transit operators also brought emergency responders and emergency aid to the World Trade Center.
In Washington, D.C., the shutdown of the federal government following the strike on the Pentagon on 9/11 clogged the road network and Metro became the mode of choice, evacuating several hundred thousand people from Washington and northern Virginia in a few hours. Emergency personnel arrived at the site by Metro and regional bus system buses, which stayed on scene in support of the response and recovery. Even so, immediately after the strike on the Pentagon, police and senior local and federal public officials gave Metro conflicting orders. One senior official demanded that the system be shut down out of fear of further terrorism, while others wanted to requisition transit cars to move emergency equipment. Any large metropolitan area has multiple jurisdictions and may even have multiple transit agencies. Thus having a sound, executable plan that brings all these parties together is an essential element for effectively utilizing transit in emergency evacuations. Experience in both New York City and Washington indicated that existing plans had many weaknesses.
Use of transit for evacuation in response to Hurricane Katrina failed completely. New Orleans had an emergency plan to rely on transit for the 100,000 to 200,000 New Orleans residents estimated to be without means of private transportation. The plan called for drivers to drive loaded buses, including the drivers' families, to shelters outside the city, but few drivers reported to work. Even had the drivers been available, the city's 500 transit and school buses could only have moved a fraction of the residents estimated to be transit-dependent. Several transit agencies and Amtrak had vehicles and drivers ready to assist, but communications breakdowns and the lack of an incident management control center in the immediate aftermath of the storm resulted in these assets sitting idle. In the case of New Orleans, the problem was having a plan that wasn't workable, but at least there was a semblance of a plan for transit. A 2001 review of 16 state hurricane emergency evacuation plans found no specific plans to rely on transit for evacuation.
This study focused on a macro-level view of the overall share of trips that potentially could occur by transit in an emergency within the nation's 38 largest urbanized areas. (This narrowing of the scope requested by Congress has been approved by the authoring staff.) Technical resources to support the committee's work, however, were sparse. The committee, therefore, examined a few cases in depth, relying on detailed analyses of the emergency plans for a few places, supplemented by briefings by local officials and experts on regional emergency evacuation plans and transit's role in them. The cases were selected to represent a range of transit operations to include a city with a heavy share of trips by rail, such as New York; a balance between rail and bus, such as Washington, D.C., or San Francisco; a heavy reliance on bus; and special circumstances, such as the role of ferries in some coastal cities. For most large urban areas, particularly those outside of the Northeast, most transit users ride buses rather than trains. Thus, in an emergency, the performance of transit will be highly dependent upon the performance of the highway system. In all case studies, the performance of the highway system were included in the analysis.
A handful of studies were conducted about transit operations in New York and Washington, D.C., following 9/11, but even these do not provide as much detail on evacuation as would be desirable. In the wake of Katrina, Congress tasked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with conducting an analysis of the emergency evacuation plans of the 75 largest U.S. cities; the results of that analysis are due to Congress by February 2006 and may prove valuable to the committee. It should also be possible to estimate transit's potential role in emergencies using the results of regional transportation models. Estimates of transit mode share in afternoon peak-period travel will provide a rough estimate of the share and number of potential riders at peak demand when networks are saturated.
This study evaluated the role that the public transportation systems serving the 38 largest urbanized areas in the United States could play in the nation's security, and will assess the ability of such systems to accommodate the evacuation, egress, and ingress of people to or from critical locations in times of emergency. The analysis was largely based upon existing literature, a few case studies, and analysis of state and regional emergency evacuation plans.
The committee met 4 times in the course of the study. In addition to being briefed by DHS and FTA staff on transit's role in emergency evacuations, the committee conducted case studies of the planning for use of transit in emergencies in five urbanized areas and examined the treatment of transit's role in the emergency evacuation plans of as many of the 38 largest urbanized areas as feasible. The case studies included examination of alternate scenarios for evacuation and considered availability of alternate routes and modes. The committee sought the assistance of transit agencies and regional planning agencies in modeling scenarios to the extent that they could be modeled and these agencies could offer the assistance.
Status: The final report was published as TRB Special Report 294.
