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Comment by throwayit | Hacker News Reader

1) Houston is one of the biggest metros areas in America at ~6 million. Even cities with strong public transportation wouldn't have the resources to bus and train 6 million people

2) There aren't many train lines, passenger trains, and most of the lines are inaccessible to most of the city.

3) There are not many buses in the city as the city is hugely sprawled out so public transportation is weak.

However, even if Rita happened to a city like say Boston, with strong public transportation options, the disaster would be pretty similar. The traffic infrastructure just isn't there to transport 6 million+ people no matter what vehicle.

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Why is that an okay situation to be in? Given things floods, dirty bombs, etc. have a non-zero chance of happening, shouldn't cities, states and countries have the infrastructure to perform mass-evacuations if necessary?

> Why is that an okay situation to be in?

Because the cost to not be in it is enormous.

Enormous compared to what? We spend 3.2 trillion a year on Medicare, which is 9.9K a person [1]. Imagine if just 1K per person per year (300B) was spent on infrastructure every year to make mass evacuations over a few days possible. Imagine how great normal day to day travel would be once that is in place, city by city.

[1] https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...

> Enormous compared to what?

Enormous compared to the value provided.

> We spend 3.2 trillion a year on Medicare

No, we don't. As your own source says, it is only $646 billion on Medicare, and $3.2 trillion a year in total combined public and private healthcare expenditures.

> Imagine if just 1K per person per year (300B) was spent on infrastructure every year to make mass evacuations over a few days possible.

Then it still probably wouldn't be enough, and we'd get a lot more value for nearly doubling infrastructure spending [0] if we spent it on something else.

[0] $416 billion/year in 2014, https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52463

You have to weigh the death toll of the evacuation against the death toll of the disaster.

We see the flooding issue right now--an evacuation would have killed far more people.

A dirty bomb? Once the bomb goes off you will have plenty of time to evacuate where you need to. Keeping radioactivity contained would be more problematic than removing people.

A biological agent? You want to quarantine rather than evacuate.

A fire? San Diego showed how to deal with that--phased evacuations ahead of the actual fire path.

Earthquake? Well, once it's done you have plenty of time to evacuate.

I can't really think of anything that would affect something the size of Houston simultaneously.

> 1) Houston is one of the biggest metros areas in America at ~6 million. Even cities with strong public transportation wouldn't have the resources to bus and train 6 million people

I'd disagree here. Many major cities in the world could probably get this done. I guess you could get London evacuated within a day just by trains if you plan accordingly. And that'll be the case for most European cities as well as many in Asia. It's just US cities which have little to no public transport (except for NYC).

A complete evacuation of Houston to Dallas is like evacuating Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht most of the way to Paris.

Except the Houston metro area is physically larger than that part of the Netherlands (the populations are close enough to the same).

Evacuating the Randstaad is feasible within a few days, at least in theory. Most people live walking distance from a tram, bus or train station.

Even equating civility, which is not the case, between the NL and TX, there's literally no public transport available, period. Roads are not an option (just check any daily commute between say Montrouse and Katy).

Houston is a dead trap in events like this, with no recourse available other than holing up and hoping it's not your time.

Evacuation or not, I'm sure to leave the city at the slightest sign of heavy rain, and I haven't regretted so far.

Source: I lived in both places for the last ten years.

I mostly thought the comparison of scope was useful.

I do wonder how long it would actually take to move 3-5 million people ~500 km though. Quite a project.

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