I know the easy answer is politics but it has to be more complicated that that because evacuations tend to involve other things that go against certain politics (like free food and open shelters). And even though somewhere like Florida doesn’t have tons of public buses, it would be logistically relatively easy to redirect the ones they do have plus school buses and private buses that are currently in disuse. Or for Amtrak to send extra trains down there, like cities do for sporting events. I’m seeing a lot of people online who seem like they’d be willing to jump on the first train/bus/plane to literally anywhere. What’s the logic in not making that more available as an option?
I’m using the US but I do feel like it’s not something you see even in general, at least not as much as expected.
Are there more complex reasons that I’m not considering?
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There are good answers here, but one I still haven’t seen: people panic and want all to evacuate as soon as possible. One thing is getting people to work every morning when everybody knows the right time to leave, when there is traffic, not everybody goes at the same time, people work in different places, some don’t move. One other thing is getting everybody out all together from the same starting point. Things get clogged, and it’s not that adding 10 trains multiplies tenfold the people moved, because if you have ever seen an overcrowded metro platform, you know that trains take ages to leave. Add the fear of losing your only ride and that panic of what’s happening and you have all the trains/buses stopped at the station waiting for people to stop killing each other for a spot on the train. That’s why usually if it’s forecast that people would clog the public transport it gets stopped, even for emergencies.
As an example, at the start of COVID in Italy, when the country was still open, rumors spread that they would have locked down the first regions where COVID was spreading. Milan was inside one of these regions, and at about 7pm everyone who didn’t want to get locked in a city went to the main station to take a train out. There were so many people the trains were delayed by hours, and only by dawn the station cleared. They also had to send the military at one point to try to manage the situation. And the number of people were less than the people that pass from that station on a normal morning, but they arrived all together and wanted to leave as soon as possible, clogging everything.
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