Evaluation of Emergency Evacuation Strategies for Downtown Event Traffic Using a Dynamic Network Model

Abstract

This research studied the feasibility of applying a dynamic traffic assignment model, Dynasmart-P, to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative strategies for evacuating the traffic in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota, under a hypothetical emergency situation that included the evacuation of a sellout crowd in the Metrodome. For this study, the southwest portion of the Twin Cities metro area was selected as the study network, and a set of different network configurations was evaluated for effectiveness in coping with a given emergency situation. The simulation results indicate that managing traffic conditions at the outbound freeway links in the given network during the evacuation period and the access capacity from the downtown area to those outbound freeway links are the critical factors affecting the effectiveness of evacuation operations. For example, the evacuation time under the contraflow operations with the freeways surrounding the downtown area was substantially reduced when the capacities of the key entrance ramps were also increased.