Mill Valley Evacuation Study

TL;DR

This study uses a microscopic traffic simulator to analyze evacuation scenarios in Mill Valley, CA, highlighting strategies like reducing vehicles per household and rerouting traffic to optimize evacuation times.

Contribution

It introduces modified simulation parameters for better relevance and identifies effective routing strategies to significantly improve evacuation efficiency.

Findings

Reducing vehicles per household decreases evacuation time.

Routing traffic to least-used on-ramps improves evacuation efficiency.

Targeted evacuation of specific areas demonstrates varied impacts.

Abstract

Traffic evacuation planning can be essential in saving lives in case of natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods and wildfires. We build on a case study of traffic evacuation planning for the city of Mill Valley, CA. We run a microscopic traffic simulator to examine various evacuation scenarios. We modify some crucial aspects of a previous study to make the simulation more pertinent. For a citywide evacuation, we quantify the importance of decreasing the number of vehicles per household. We find a set of changes that can significantly reduce the evacuation time by routing more traffic to the least-used highway on-ramps. We show results when evacuating various areas of the city one at a time.