Disaster Management for Urban Commute in a Multimodal Transportation Context

摘要

An interdependent multimodal transportation system, commonly used for commuting in urban areas, such as Baltimore City and Washington DC, may be comprised of various transportation modes with flexible transfer options, such as automobiles, buses, subways, and other types of rail transit. A sudden event, such as a disaster due to a terrorist attack, which may require evacuation of an isolated area within the highway network adds to the challenge of examining the efficiency and reliability of such an interdependent system. In disasters there are complexities associated with the dynamic nature of the commuting pattern, formation of choke points, and the ensuing chaos, that may affect people's route choice behavior in the face of urgent evacuation. For road traffic many transportation engineers utilize route guidance system as a tool for managing traffic away from the disaster area. With uncertainty in the commuting pattern during a disaster, system efficiency is crucial to minimizing evacuation time. Within a multimodal framework, this paper offers optimal shortest paths to improve pedestrian and transit modes of the transportation system efficiency in different disaster situations specific to urban commute.