Every major city seems to have a staging area for tri-level autoracks and unloading of new automobiles. Why not reverse the flow and use the same area to stage buses or passenger cars from Amtrak. One of the complaints about evacuating Houston was the Houston Mayor stated there was not enough road capacity headed North of the city. Just seems they have enough rail lines headed out of the city that could handle a few extra trains.
Now they did use Amtrak to evacuate New Orleans. They had shuttle trains between New Orleans Union Station and Downtown Mobile. Mostly Superliner Coaches.
My guess is that the time required to set such an operation up would have exceeded the time available. Plus that’s pretty much a dead end part of the network, isn’t it? Limits in track capacity to get the required cars down there would conflict with trains making their exit, possibly?
…and everybody forgets what happened to Flagler’s FEC at the beginning. As the previous posters noted, timing and line capacity have an effect on short term capabilities/planning.
(already amused to see the east coast bias of the news media playing out)
there are 20,000,000 cars in Florida. If you have to evacuate 25% of them you have to move 5,000,000 cars. If you have an 8 lane freeway (all one way), you can move 150,000 cars in one day. It takes 34 days to evacuate. The bottom line is there is no way to evacuate that many people in that limited area. The thought of using public transportation is a joke. The train and bus drivers will leave with their families long before they get a train or bus together. There is not enough warning time to evacuate places like Florida (or Texas) but the officials pretend it can be done. Moving a few 100 autos (or 1000 people) on the train would help but the problem is just too big.
In the case evacuation is due in part to severe flooding, evacuating with car will likely mean saving the car. 20/20 hindsight with Harvey and Houston suggests that fewer cars would been totaled by the flooding.
Evacuation by rail might make sense if there is a large inventory of commuter rail cars and the evacuation distance is on the order of tens of miles.
You’re only figuring 150,000 cars on an 8-lane freeway per day? Sorry but this is a massive lowball.
I-90 going north from downtown Chicago varies from 8-12 lanes, and there are parts that handle 300,000 vehicles per day.
So I’d give 250,000 vehicles per day on an 8-lane freeway, at least. This has to keep in mind that these are measurements of an average per day, and surely I-90 does have quiet hours. So in theory with a full-blast 24-hour evacuation where traffic is controlled to limit backups should be able to handle at least 250,000 VPD on an 8-lane. On a typical 4-lane freeway however, that number is going to be much closer to the 150,000 number you quoted. However they could increase this by allowing shoulder driving, assuming the shoulder is wide enough, which on interstates, it usually is.
The key to mass evacuations is advance warning. Not everybody can leave all at once, even in the best circumstances. Obsticles like construction zones need to be removed as much as possible, and there also needs to be a significant amount of thought given to side roads, as they’re going to provide, in a place like Florida, as much if not more capacity than the couple of freeways running towards Georgia.
One of the design considerations of the early Interstate Highway System was high-speed evacuation of population centers. That’s why the roads were generally engineered for speeds in excess of 70 MPH.
Construction notwithstanding, we all know what will happen when one doofus causes a fender-bender that ties up all the lanes. Or even one lane. It all turns into a linear parking lot.
That said, in 1960 there were only 60 million cars registered nationwide. in 2017, there were 20 million registered just in Florida. There have been some quantum increases in highway capacity, but…
The likely scenario that’s being asked for is an evacuation by rail from Miami…Amtrak doesn’t have much spair equipment at all, and if their schedules were cancelled, it may have had none at all south of Jacksonville. I’m pretty sure the last Auto Train in the area was northbound.
From what I’ve heard (and Balt would know), the dispatchers are/were in the process or moving back to Jacksonville, on EHH’s dime. I suspect some of them have hunkered in the bunker there. But the lines in Florida are pretty effectively shut down. An evacuation using Tri-Rail equipment from Miami might be doable, but it still would have had to have been done by rules or orders–and the first tree that falls across the tracks or the first signal system that goes black would pretty much terminate the effort.
A lane of interstate highway can handle about 2000 vehicle an hour. A non-controlled access highway, about half that.
If a highway is in a jammed condition, flow can be reduced by more than half.
So, if there are 9 interstate lanes and 15 non interstate lanes being used for evacuation, that means something like 15-33,000 vehicles per hour. If you put four people in a vehicle, that’s 60-132,000 people an hour.
If you could run 20 car trains with 80 folk per coach at 6 minute intervals, fleeting a single track freight RR, that’s 16,000 people an hour per RR.
But, what if we used buses? Assuming capactity is reduced a bit because buses are longer and need a bit more spacing…10-25,000 vehicles per hour, at 50 people per bus is 500,000 to 1,250,000 people per hour.
If I REALLY want to get 10 or 20 million people from here to there in a hurry, I’d use buses.
i used highway design numbers. There are no continuous 12 lane highways thru Florida. And use of busses and trains requires busses and trains. Their crews left with their families long ago.
Betweeen I-75, I-95 and the Florida Turnpike there are multiple lanes available out of South Florida headed North. Only I-75 and I-95 leave the state.
I-95 is ‘mostly’ 3 or more lane in each direction except for a couple of counties that are working on adding the 3rd lane - those counties would create ‘pinch points’ to the flow or traffic.
One thing that is overlooked, even if you leave S. Florida with a full tank - YOU WILL HAVE TO REFUEL before you leave Florida. It is a LONG way from S. Florida to the Georgia line.
There are also federal and state highways leading north, but given the mass exodus I’ certain most, if not all, were crowded to the point of becoming parking lots.
Fuel availibility was another concern, and the lack of seems to be the result of poor planning ahead of the storm. A map of Florida stations that still had fuel during the evacuation reveals that lack. Granted, some stations lost power and could not pump gas.
IMO, the ‘Boy Scouts’ failed to follow their motto.
No power available to pump gasoline? Quick! Install the old Armstrong pumps, and pumpp the gasoline up into a container at the top of the pump and then let gravity fill your fuel tank. I do not think I have seen one of those pumps since some time in the forties.
About nineteen years ago, I used one of the pumps that had you zero the readings with a crank–in Ely, Nevada.
The problems with a rail evacuation isn’t with the railroad. Its the logistics of getting people to the train and then what to do with them at the other end.
You have to be able to get thousands of people to one spot at the same time That means you have to have parking for thousands of cars near the railhead or have some sort of bus feeder system to get them there. People will be bringing pets and everything they can carry so you will have to have baggage capability (with security for the baggage).
You will have to have food, water and bathrooms, plus medical coverage for the loading area and on the train.
Once you get to the other end you will have to have transportation to move thousands of people at nearly the same time away from the railhead to someplace else (plus all their pets and baggage). You will need some way to match up the baggage and the people. If you get the transportation you will have to figure out where to take them for shelter.
The rail portion is almost trivial. During Katrina, Amtrak moved coach trainsets to the New Orleans area and the railroads were operable and willing to run the passenger trains. But they never ran the service, because the logistics off the railroad couldn’t be organized quick enough.
