A Highway Vehicle Routing Dataset During the 2019 Kincade Fire Evacuation

As wildfires become increasingly more prevalent and severe in California, it is imperative to study how people respond to wildfire events. To support wildfire evacuation research, this project publishes the first dataset to capture highway vehicle routing behavior during the 2019 Kincade Fire, Sonoma County, California. The dataset is completely anonymous and includes a total of 21,160 highway trips from October 16, 2019 to November 13, 2019. Fields of the new dataset include anonymous user ID, latitude of a vehicle’s entrance of a highway, longitude of a vehicle’s entrance of a highway, timestamp of a vehicle’s entrance of a highway, entrance highway, latitude of a vehicle’s exit of a highway, longitude of a vehicle’s exit of a highway, timestamp of a vehicle’s exit of a highway, exit highway. This highway vehicle routing dataset is presented in comma-separated values (CSV) format. We also provide a shapefile of the highways included in the dataset (i.e., U.S. Highway 101, State Highways 1, 12, 37, 116, 121, and 128). This new dataset can be used to better analyze a householder’s evacuation departure time and route choice and to validate the existing evacuation simulation models. This dataset can also serve as an educational instrument to train the next-generation disaster scientists and engineers who can leverage big data analytics for weather-ready research.