Critical Behavioral Assumptions in Evacuation Time Estimate Analysis for Private Vehicles: Examples from Hurricane Research and Planning

The computation of evacuation time estimates (ETEs) for communities threatened by hurricanes requires analysts to develop sophisticated models of evacuation flows and significant progress has been made in this area over the past 25 years. However, ETEs also require accurate assumptions about the behavior of the risk area population, but social scientists’ research on population behavior has been poorly integrated with transportation engineers’ development of evacuation models. To address this disjuncture, the present article lists the principal behavioral variables affecting hurricane ETEs, describes the available empirical data relevant to ETE models, and provides recommendations for future analytic methods and research.