On the news when you see pictures of traffic jams for hurricans the interstate roads leading out are jammed for miles but the roads leading back towards the shore are largely empty. Why weren’t the roads leading inward commandeered, the on ramps blocked off so there were no accidents and both north and south interstate lanes used to evacuate people? Since there was very little traffic going back towards the shore the people who did want to go that way could’ve just taken the highway instead.
My W.A.G. on this is that emergency workers, police, or National Guard would not want to have to battle their way upstream to get to the threatened areas.
There may not be as many vehicles going inot the area, but those would want to get there as quickly as possible, which would not be possible if both sides of the highway were flowing out.
In the case for Katrina, yes, both lanes were used, but not all the time. They started closing them Sunday night.
There have been other threads on this. The main reason is that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to have freeways run the wrong way. Offramps are designed so people won’t go on them. So you would need to have traffic cops at each one telling people to get on the freeway there. And you have to keep the onramps on the wrong side closed.
In a city like Houston that can be hard to do since the freeway system is pretty extensive.
Good question, considering it’s the The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
My WAGs:
- the bottleneck(s) at the exit(s) would still exist
- the other side of the highway has limited acess points, creating more bottlenecks
- where only a grass strip exists, drivers would be tempted to drive on that, increasing the chance of accidents
- at least one southbound lane needed to remain open for emergency personel, and they couldn’t break out enough orange cones fast enough
Since reversible lanes exist in many places I’ve seen (St. Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago – reversed for rush hour, at least), it would seem to be a golden opportunity for someone to plan this action as part of an emergency evacuation. My guess is no provision was ever made for it, but it will be next time.
It’s called contraflow lane reversal, and they did use it for both Katrina and Rita.
I-16 out of Savannah, GA has drop-gate barriers on the ramps on the eastbound lanes that turn the highway into one way for about 125 miles inland. I believe they were installed after Hurricane Hugo and a very messy evacuation, and the setup was shown to work very well during the Floyd evac in 1999 (Here’s an article). I was very surprised to learn that this sort of setup isn’t more common in hurricane-prone areas.