(dramatic music)
- [Announcer] Approximately seven million people
live on the Texas coast.
When the hurricane threatens to stay,
moving that population out of harm's way can be a challenge.
The Center for Transportation Research
and the Texas Department of Transportation
are investigating different ways
to create a fail safe information transfer system.
- You know, we want to make sure
that the evacuation routes are flowing
as smoothly as possible.
We wanna make sure that if there's any accidents,
that those get prioritized to try to clear off
any accidents that may be blocking lanes
on these critical evacuation routes.
We also wanna make sure
that people are utilizing all these routes
to their full capability.
And so in the project we used something called
an analytical hierarchy process,
which is a way for trying to make decisions
when there's lots of these different complex factors
that are there.
And so we hope that this process will help TxDOT
in trying to come up with evacuation management policies
that take into account
all of these different factors that are important.
- There was some workshops and interviews and outreach,
and then for the different people who are involved,
the districts, they wanted to know what information
was out there and whatever devices
that they had already in place,
and then put it together
and then give different scenarios
on how we could use it in an effective manner.
And also to be able to push out information
to the traveling public for evacuation times,
and also for them to be able to come back
into their various regions after the evacuations.
- The main outcome of this project
is a framework for TxDOT to determine
what the best path forward is,
to balance these different criteria,
to see what the role is of new technologies,
to try to identify what the critical corridors are
for particular events, come up with a process
and a framework that they could use
to try to, you know, to figure out how
to manage things best given
the different needs that the agency has.
- It could be a two-pronged approach.
For us, we may be looking at maybe gaps
in the second or tier two roads versus already or tier one.
We have cameras and we have DMS signs already
on our major corridors.
But this secondary or smaller evacuation route
we may be looking at how do we put more cameras there?
- Evacuations are often an unfamiliar and scary time,
and so people don't always know the best routes
for that to be taking.
And so one of the key findings
is that technologies can play a big role
in making this process work a lot better.
- [Announcer] For more information
and to find the publication for this project,
please visit the TxDOT Research Library
at the link shown below.