Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1155/atr/5836541

Publication Title

Journal of Advanced Transportation

Volume

2026

Issue

1

Pages

5836541 (12 pp.)

Abstract

Hurricane Irma stands as one of the most destructive tropical storms to make landfall in the United States, particularly impacting the State of Florida, where it prompted the largest evacuation in history with approximately 7 million residents. The profound consequences of mass evacuation underscore the critical need to understand travel behaviors during hurricane evacuation and the recovery process. This research analyzes statewide evacuation and re-entry patterns, leveraging diverse datasets, including TTMS data from main corridors and GIS data. A statewide corridor-based empirical analysis framework is constructed to characterize evacuation and re-entry response patterns using sensor-based traffic observations. The results show that evacuation and re-entry curves can characterize corridor-level emergency response and recovery patterns. The observed evacuation response varied across corridors and was associated with the spatial structure of the evacuation network, storm progression, and the distribution of major evacuation routes. Re-entry showed weaker and less consistent corridor-level spatial heterogeneity than evacuation and, in several locations, displayed stepwise or intermittent recovery patterns. In addition, the I-10 corridor exhibited a distinct east–west interstate pattern, with prolonged westbound evacuation loading and relatively concentrated eastbound re-entry traffic. The findings provide empirical insights for state agencies in emergency transportation management, corridor planning, and postdisaster recovery assessment.

Rights

© 2026 Xin Wang et al.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Data Availability

Article states: "The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request."

Original Publication Citation

Wang, X., Zhu, Y., Yang, H., & Xie, K. (2026). Statewide corridor evacuation response and re-entry behaviors in Florida during Hurricane Irma. Journal of Advanced Transportation, 2026(1), Article 5836541. https://doi.org/10.1155/atr/5836541 

ORCID

0000-0003-2808-8852 (Yang), 0000-0002-8191-2786 (Xie)

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