« More Gloomy News From State | Main | All's Well... »
September 24, 2005
Houston's Evacuation Plans
While awaiting any significant rain from Hurricane Rita (we've had some gusty winds throughout the evening), I found this perceptive analysis of the well-publicized traffic jams emanating from Houston (from Austin Bay's blog):
Why is it taking so long? Well, try this math problem: If 100,000 cars, averaging 20 feet in length are stopped bumper to bumper on four lanes, how long does the traffic jam stretch?
Answer: A half-million feet, or 94.7 miles. In other words, the distance from Houston to College Station, the home of Texas A&M.
The Houston metropolitan area contains more than 5 million people. To keep the math simple, let’s just assume that there are 1 million cars departing coastal Texas for points west. One million cars, on four lanes stretches 1,000 miles. Bumper to bumper on one lane, and those same cars will form a traffic jam greater in length than the distance from Houston, Texas to Juneau, Alaska.
There's been some criticism of local officials for not opening up the opposing lanes of the interstates soon enough. But those plans were in place; just not to the distances finally arrived at. I-45, the main freeway north out of Houston, was opened for single-direction traffic all the way to Buffalo, Texas. That's 125 miles, over halfway to Dallas! And on I-10 west out of the city, single-direction traffice was allowed all the way to Sequin--160 miles, or over 80% of the distance to San Antonio. The logistics involved are fearsome--think of all the jurisdictions that must be contacted.
I'm sure that mistakes were made, and there are areas needed improvement, but all in all I think we did a good job.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thebernoullieffect.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/351
Comments
"A good job?" Don't be so modest. Y'all did great. Compare this to New Orleans--and people are whining that there were traffic jams? The response was sober, organized and impressive and thank goodness everyone came through alright. No response will ever be perfect but this was a very good show.
Posted by: AcademicElephant at September 24, 2005 09:14 AM
Yeah, I'm pretty happy with the way our Republican county judge and Democrat mayor worked together. I think they both may have further political aspirations and thus had some slight self-interest in doing well, but that's OK.
Posted by: Jeff at September 24, 2005 02:24 PM
Self-interest is a powerful motivator. What did you think of Perry, speaking of further political ambitions? I thought he was great, but I'm not on the ground as it were.
Posted by: AcademicElephant at September 24, 2005 04:47 PM
I didn't catch a lot of Perry's press conferences. In general, he's a nice guy and pretty competent, but I don't think he's as dynamic as Bush was as governor. He seems to be more of pro-business Rebublican rather than a movement conservative.
Posted by: Jeff at September 25, 2005 11:09 AM
Number of people who dies because of the slow traffic out of Houston: Zero. That, in the end, is the only statistic that matters. But even in the face of that success, officials are still finding ways to do it better next time. That's effective local government.
Posted by: Jim Voigt at September 26, 2005 07:02 AM
