Planning for Emergency Evacuation: Are Large Canadian Cities Ready?

This paper addresses the essential elements and strategies that should be in place for large-scale evacuations under emergency situations, particularly in densely used networks such as in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal to name a few. Some questions that possess some indispensable information to achieve that goal are proposed. A novel framework that addresses these questions is proposed and applied to evacuate the entire City of Toronto as a case study. A large-scale evacuation model is developed for the evacuation of the City of Toronto in cases of emergency. A demand estimation model is first designed to accurately quantify the evacuation demand by mode (drivers vs. transit users), over time of the day when the crisis begins and over space (location). The output of the demand estimation model is then fed into two optimization platforms; (1) an Optimal Spatio-Temporal Evacuation (OSTE) model that synergizes evacuation scheduling, route choice, and destination choice for vehicular traffic; and (2) a model based on a new variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) to optimize the routing and scheduling of mass transit vehicles. The study concluded that OSTE can clear the City of Toronto four times faster than the do-nothing strategy. Introduction and Background Canada’s history of man-made disasters and natural threats mimics that of the United States but as a distorted reflection. While emergency evacuation and management systems in Canada have not experienced the frequency or the severity of the United States events, emergency management in Canada has drawn significant experience from the events and developments in the United States emergency management systems.