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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>it would be logistically relatively easy to redirect the ones they do have plus school buses
Didn’t they find out during Katrina that the bus drivers also want to evacuate with their families? I thought that was part of the problem is that a lot of them evacuated before they were expecte to.
>Or for Amtrak to send extra trains down there, like cities do for sporting events
For sporting events the trains are running a short distance and dropping people to where their next point of departure is. Like, leaving the Meadowlands in NJ and getting dropped off in Manhattan, people then go to metro north or their subway or the LIRR, whatever. They continue on home. But for a specific hurricane exactly what is the plan? I would think that because the storm’s path can change you’d have to take people more than a few hours away. But you’d want to drop them off as soon as possible to go back and get more people. So would you be taking half the people down to Miami and half up to Tallahassee? when they get dropped off, where do they go? Are you going to limit what they can take on the train?
My guess is people take their cars because they load up with a lot of their stuff, and they have pets. And they want to save their vehicles. That’s the case for my relatives in Florida anyway.
Definitely for people who can’t or don’t want to take their cars, more public transit would be a good idea. But I get the idea that the logistics aren’t simple and especially with buses you can’t count on having people to run them.
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