Re: Comet impact in the Eastern United States - Feasibility of Evacuation

On Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:27:42 +0100, Matthias Warkus
<Warkus@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>Matt Browne SFW schrieb:

>> Is it possible to evacuate at least 90% of the 100 million people
>> living there?
>
>Just thinking aloud about some of the logistics:
>
>The highest throughput achieved by any trans****tation system in the 
>world on a single route is about 2.6 million travellers per day, if we 
>want to believe Wikipedia (Mumbai Suburban Railway's Western line). This 
>goes along well with theoretical estimates, as it means approx. one 
>1800-passenger train every minute over 24 hours. An evacuation means 
>that all passengers go in one direction and empty trains go back, so the 
>capacity is halved to 1.3 million per day. With the kind of schedule 
>that is used in wartime, i.e. minimal headways and the same very low top 
>speed for all trains, capacity can probably be raised to 2 million per 
>day. The question is whether broken-down trains can be shunted out 
>quickly and how in the world people are supposed to embark at this kind 
>of rate. Most US railways are single-track, you'd have to use separate 
>lines for trains moving out and empty trains moving in.
>Probably, to evacuate just one million per day, you'd already need a 
>total of four to five lines radiating out from the evacuation area and 
>about 1500 to 3000 trainsets of ten to 15 cars. It should be possible to 
>cobble these together from commuter rail stock and  boxcars.
>
>AFAIK, the best-organised motorway traffic will never reach the 
>capacities of rail trans****t; it's unlikely that the 13-second headway 
>that was achieved on the Voie sacrée can be much improved on. Probably, 
>even on very large motorways, only the two outermost lanes can be used, 
>because the inner lanes will quickly be blocked by broken-down vehicles 
>that cannot be pushed off the road. 

?

Huh?  Why?

>Maybe on US highways with large 
>medians, the two innermost lanes can be used as well. If we assume 
>vehicles loaded with an average of five persons (counting in vans, 
>trucks, requisitioned school buses etc.), on four lanes, with 10-second 
>headways, about 170.000 people can travel on a single highway in one 
>day. There are many more highways than railway lines, but keeping 
>traffic going at Red Ball Express rates in an evacuation scenario with 
>layman drivers will be nightmarish. Maybe 100.000 people per day per 
>route can move out on twenty routes. Maybe.
>
>Aerial trans****t will make a modest contribution at best as even the 
>busiest air****ts have trouble handling 200000 passengers a day. Boats 
>won't be able to contribute much at all, there not being enough 
>passenger vessels to go round, and besides, the next safe destinations 
>are rather far away.
>
>Evacuating 90 million people in four weeks requires moving out three 
>million all day, every day. I think this can be done, but just barely, 
>with millions of personnel, and with lots of luck.
>
>Oh, and of course nobody gets to take along anything but the minimal 
>carry-on luggage. Good luck enforcing that.
-- 
"Why is it, Scott, that we always have to respect their cultural context?
 Why is it that they never seem to respect ours?"
   President John P. Ryan in Executive Orders