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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The biggest problem is that people want to take stuff with them. They want to take a weeks worth of clothes per person. They want to take their pets. They want to take irreplaceable things like their wedding album.
Public transit works for commuting because people are mostly just bringing a laptop with them. It doesn’t work for emergencies because people are bringing a LOT with them. You can’t fit 50 people on a bus *and* all their stuff.
They are, it’s just not seen as much because we really don’t have public transit in America.
Individual cities or regions have public transit, but that’s only going to get you from one location in a city to another. It’s potentially helpful, but it’s not getting you out of the state. The south is lacking in cities with good public transit.
You then have some states with decent enough public transit, i.e. New Jersey has Jersey Rail, New York and Connecticut have Metro North, but that’s mostly in the Northeast.
There is Amtrak which is nationwide, but it is expensive and lacking in many ways. For example Tampa is the only city on the gulf coast of Florida that has an Amtrak station.
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Ask Ray Nagin how well he handled that with the school busses and Katrina…
New Orleans had parking lots full of empty school busses and wouldn’t use them to get people out of the area after the storm hit and everything flooded. If I recall, a kid, like 16 years old or thereabouts, broke into one and basically stole it, filled it full of evacuees, and drove to Houston. I think he got in trouble for it but that dude is a freaking hero in my book.
Like everyone else said, they are, to shelters. Why aren’t local busses headed out of town?
1. Local busses are being used for prep and evacuation already. In the lead up to the storm, people rely on public transit to get to work (including essential workers who cannot evacuate), to grocery stores, to safer places nearby, to airports, to train stations, etc.
2. There are already long distance busses available through Greyhound and regional bus networks.
3. People want to save their cars. If you HAVE a car, you want to get your car somewhere safe. The easiest way to do that is to drive it somewhere.
4. Budget. Re-routing a few busses to local area shelters isn’t a huge ask. Driving busses out of town completely off any local route requires more gas/drivers.
5. Logistics. You don’t simply drive a bunch of local busses out of town without drivers trained on the route or plans on where to re-fuel.
6. Local busses are not necessarily designed for long distance transport. They have hard plastic seats and no bathrooms or places to store luggage.
7. Transportation is only one reason people can’t/don’t evacuate. Many are worried about paying for hotels/food/basic needs while traveling. Busses to free shelters help those people.
I could think of a few reasons:
Public transport seems to be everywhere because it goes round and round in circles. The actual bus station has a limited number of buses.
Their tanks might be sized to cover one rush hour, and then need refilling at the station.
Mechanically, public transit is notoriously unreliable. Why keep them in tip top shape if they can just sub a new bus in when they need to. Imagine breaking down 30 miles outside of the city you’re fleeing.
>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.
Public transport and existing infrastructure gets used all the time for evacuations. However public transportation isn’t always the best answer.
Amtrak doesn’t go everywhere. Your local bus/subway system is local. Buses are good for people who don’t have possessions to save.
Good evacuation plans are built by utilizing as many resources as possible. I’ve seen thousands of people get stranded on the interstate for 24 hrs because most people didn’t think to use the state highways. This was back in 1998 or 1999. Southeast GA evacuated ahead of a hurricane. I got home in five hours vs 24 hours for most people.
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I suspect a shortage of vehicles isn’t really the problem, things like convincing people to leave and slow traffic are probably bigger issues.
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