Mill Valley Evacuation Study

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.