Data from: Improving public safety through spatial synthesis, mapping, modeling, and performance analysis of emergency evacuation routes in California localities

The risk of natural disasters, many of which are amplified by climate
change, requires the protection of emergency evacuation routes to permit
evacuees safe passage. California has recognized the need through the AB
747 Planning and Zoning Law, which requires each county and city in
California to update their - general plans to include safety elements from
unreasonable risks associated with various hazards, specifically
evacuation routes and their capacity, safety, and viability under a range
of emergency scenarios. These routes must be identified in advance and
maintained so they can support evacuations. Today, there is a lack of a
centralized database of the identified routes or their general assessment.
Consequently, this proposal responds to Caltrans’ research priority for
“GIS Mapping of Emergency Evacuation Routes.” Specifically, the project
objectives are: 1) create a centralized GIS database, by collecting and
compiling available evacuation route GIS layers, and the safety element of
the evacuation routes from different jurisdictions as well as their use in
various types of evacuation scenarios such as wildfire, flooding, or
landslides. 2) Perform network analyses and modeling based on the team’s
experience with road network performance, access restoration, and critical
infrastructure modeling, for a set of case studies, as well as, assessing
their performance considering the latest evacuation research. 3) Analyze
how well current bus and rail routes align with evacuation routes; and for
a series of case studies, using data from previous evacuations, evaluate
how well aligned the safety elements of the emerging plans are, relative
to previous evacuation routes. And 4) analyze different metrics about the
performance of the evacuation routes for different segments of the
population (e.g., elderly, mobility constrained, non-vehicle households,
and disadvantaged communities). The database and assessments will help
inform infrastructure investment decisions and to develop recommendations
on how best to maintain State transportation assets and secure safe
evacuation routes, as they will identify the road segments with the
largest impact on the evacuation route/network performance. The project
will deliver a GIS of the compiled plans, a report summarizing the
creation of the database and the analyses and will make a final
presentation of the study results.