Hurricanes cause some of the worst traffic conditions, affecting evacuees' abilities toreach safety before they are subjected to high winds, heavy rain, and flooding. This paper isamong the few to use a panel survey to examine similar household decisions over consecutivehurricanes. Our study focuses on Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina, which were of similar strengthand followed similar paths, and is fairly comprehensive in the number of traffic related decisionswe consider. We use contingency tables, binary logit models, and Goodman and Kruskal'sgamma measure to examine the effects of prior decisions on (1) whether to evacuate or not, (2)day of departure, (3) destination type and location, (4) number of household vehicles taken, and(5) route selection reason. Through the statistical analyses, we discovered that (1) citizenslargely made the same evacuate/stay decision for Katrina as they did for Ivan and higher incomeswere not significant in changing this decision, (2) some evacuees departed earlier, but evacueeslargely departed on the last day possible, (3) evacuees mostly select the same type ofaccommodations and in – or out-of-the-county decisions in consecutive evacuations, (4) thenumber of household vehicles used in the evacuation does not decrease, and (5) route guidanceas a selection criterion does not depend on prior evacuation experience.
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