Hurricanes and Traffic Delays
With Hurricane Florence striking coastlines this week, millions of families needed to evacuate their homes to avoid the natural disaster. A spike in number of cars on the road, shutdown roadways, and a sense of urgency all cause traffic delays during emergency events and more routinely, at rush hour. During hurricane evacuations, the authorities will reverse traffic on the incoming highway to increase the volume of cars on the road, getting more people to a safe area in time. This changes the network of roadways, much like we have seen in class and in the homework, which allows for the evacuation process to do be done quickly and smoothly.
In class, problems arouse where the time it took to travel on certain routes would charge or be dependent on the number of drivers on the road. This parallels what happens during a hurricane evacuation where millions of people are trying to use the same major highways to get out of the impeding storm. Understanding how this type of network and its interconnections could be pivotal to increasing response time for emergency responders by giving them a deeper understanding of alterative routes during traffic delays, closed roadways, and other dilemmas which are abundant during a natural disaster. This is a prime example of when someone would use their skills learned in Networks on a real life situation.
https://www.thestate.com/news/traffic/article218159145.html