Temporospatial Analysis of Hurricane Katrina Regional Evacuation Traffic Patterns

Between the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005, a plan was developed to facilitate the evacuation of southeast Louisiana, including the City of New Orleans, when under the threat of a hurricane. The plan was created by the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development and the Louisiana State Police with the goal of eliminating or mitigating the traffic problems that were a part of the Hurricane Ivan evacuation that occurred in Sept. 2004. The cornerstone of the plan was to maximize the available roadway infrastructure within the region to move nearly the entire population in the most rapid and efficient manner. It incorporated the reversal of about 100 miles of interstate freeway across two states, restricted access to nearly 100 additional miles of freeway, while coordinating the transportation assets on a region-wide basis. This paper summarizes an effort to describe and quantify the effect of this regional evacuation plan on the movement of traffic across roadway infrastructure covering an area of nearly 75,000 square miles and a period of 3 days. The analyses illustrate the extent to which the evacuation impacted the roads in Louisiana, where these impacts were the most significant, how long they lasted, and how they compared to a prior evacuation plan in which a much lower level of management was used.