Most people are able to walk if nothing else, and it takes does not take years to walk across the US. Even if everyone just walked out of the country (excepting islands like Hawaii), most people would be out in a matter of weeks.
I think the rail system can be employed to great effect for this. If done by force freight cars can be used and we have plenty of them. Cargo ships can also be used in a forced evac. Even w/o the forced evac I would WAG that that the rail system could be a major player.
Read the post. I said the physical capacity existed.
Can a car hold two people? Yes.
Can 243,023,485 cars hold 303,194,069 people? Yes.
Can a car drive 1200 miles in 24 hours? Yes.
Is there any point in the United States that’s more than 1200 miles from a land border? No*
And then I said that organizing such an evacuation would be a lot more difficult. The real world difficulties would probably be so high that you would never complete such an evacuation. The answer to “How long would it take you to walk from New York to California?” isn’t “Forever, if you just walk around in circles.”
*This one I’m not 100% certain about. But it’ll work as a close approximation.
But you have forgotten that Delaware will still have roadworks on I-95, and only three people working at the toll booths.
With this week’s “The Wire” fresh in my mind. . .people aren’t “evacuated” unless you’re talking about emptying out their bowels.
The title should be “how quickly could the US be evacuated of people”.
Anyway. . .if we are talking about bowels, an hour?
People. . .I don’t know.
Let’s say we knew that the entire mainland of the us would turn toxic right to the borders, and nothing outside the borders would be effected.
Assuming that everyone would leave (which they wouldn’t), I’d upper-bound it by determining how long it would take an ill-provisioned person to walk from Kansas (?) to the Canadian border. That wouldn’t be YEARS. Many people would die along the way.
Maybe 200 days.
I don’t think it can be done. Where are all those people going to go? From what I can find:
U.S. pop 303 million.
Mexico 108 million.
Canada 33 million.
It isn’t just a matter of getting them out of one county, its also means getting them into another. These people could not just cross the border and stand there, they are going to need to get into some kind of town. The border towns would be so overrun, I don’t think you could get through. It would be an absolute logjam. Even if you could evenly distribute all the refugees throughout Canada and Mexico, you would be essentially tripling the population of every town in those countries.
And in Canada’s case that would not really be a bad thing, as I’m betting quite a few people would be willing to move to the Maritime provinces and potentially make them somewhat less reliant on Ottowa for financial sustenance.
Also, keep in mind that the Canada-US border is the longest in the world, at over 5500 miles, and a substantial portion of that could be used for people crossing over. It’s not exactly a bottleneck.
True, but the problem as I see it is that Americans will not just drive into the Canadian wilderness and wait. People will head for the border and absolutely overrun the nearest cities. Most freeways lead to cities. What is going to happen when the entire populations of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho (about 10 million people total) try and drive to Vancouver?
Maybe we need to get creative. We have one guy stand on the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls. The other 303,194,068 Americans raise their right hands and take an oath of allegiance to the Principality of Liechtenstein. The entire United States population is now one person. He walks across the bridge into Canada.
That’s the kind of Outside-The-Box thinking we like around here! Well done!
Just as a reference, there were reports of traffic jams in each direction of upwards of 15 miles in each direction heading to Woddstock, and that was only what a half million people?
I can honestly say I didn’t expect such analysis from the board members here; though I probably should have, given how many other topics raise such discussion. 
This was mostly just an exercise in thinking for me that my brain came up with after 24 hours without sleep.
I think it’s safe to say this is not a task that could happen within hours, days, maybe even weeks. Which is somewhat frightening, to me at least, in case disaster ever struck. But still, terrific answers… my favorite outside-the-box idea has to be Little Nemo’s.
What happens? Toll booths owners suddenly eclipse the Sultan of Dubai on the World’s Richest list.
I think you have to consider the potential incentives. If every person on earth was somehow convinced that their own personal heaven required only getting the Americans out, then I think we could do it in a week. As pointed out, we have more than enough cars to do it. If we assume that we have the full economic weight of the world helping us out, it should be possible to get the required fuel, food, and roadways cleared on that schedule. Obviously, the more constrained you make the budget, people’s willingness to leave, the bordering country’s willingness to let us in, fear and panic, etc. the longer it takes.
But that’s just logistics.
I think you would have an easier time getting all billion Chinese people to jump off a chair at the same time.
SSG Schwartz
But that’s wrong. Just because a car can hold x number of people and drive over a border within 24 hours does NOT mean the highway system has the capacity to handle the millions upon millions of cars it would take to get everyone out within that same time frame.
Speaking of Chinese people, the Chinese government seems to be getting accustomed to handling natural disasters. 2007 was a lot more successful for their “evacuation” efforts.
During last summer’s Krosa storm, they evacuated 1.4 million people in about a day. They didn’t even order ships back into dock until just a few hours before Typhoon Krosa hit land.
“People, politics ease China's disaster evacuation efforts - CNN.com”
“But while the system is effective, the efficiency cannot be entirely attributed to a central Communist regime and obedient populace, said Rayyis of the American Red Cross. Chinese officials have myriad plans for all types of disasters and regularly run drills and simulations to test those preparations.”
As for aid from other countries, how exactly are they going to help us? 99% of them lack the ability to even ship substantial amounts of aid to us. At least relative to our needs.
Not only that. Having that many cars on the road my tie up the very logistics networks that are required to provide fuel and spare parts for those millions and millions of cars. What happens when fuel trucks can’t get to the gas stations because the roads are choked with thousands of out of gas cars?
I was in the Rita evacuation from Houston. This was a major Charlie Foxtrot, and it convinces me that the correct answer is “never.” If for some reason everyone in the US jumped into a car and drove toward the nearest border, the gas stations would be empty within 24 hours. In Houston, the gas stations were empty within 6 hours of the start of the major evacution. In 24 hours, millions of people will still be in the cities where they started. It took me 16 hours to get to Austin, and I was far from the worst off. Within a week, there would be no food available, and anyone trying to walk out would be starving. Who is running the refineries to make more gas to keep cars on the road? Who is delivering it to the middle of no-where, where the people are stranded? How are they getting it there?
Rats! You beat me to it. I was figuring motor vehicles would last two days, tops, for lack of fuel. No way they could truck that much fuel to the “pinch points”, much less get through traffic. And, of course, the truck drivers and refinery workers would also be in the evacuation.
To make the total evacuation of the U.S. work, things would have to be very, very orderly. And as we have seen, mass evacuations are never orderly.