A few years ago they did call for an evacuation caused massive jams with thousands of cars stuck on highways. Many of these highways are underwater today an evacuation would have made the situation worse.
[1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/...
[1]http://www.npr.org/2017/08/29/546978194/with-much-of-houston...
For most of the US, and especially a city built like Houston, there are no good options.
Edit: I underestimated the size of the Houston Metro Area. It's closer to 100 miles by 100 miles.
There's a station in Beaumont, which is closer than San Antonio.
That said, it's still not enough to even come close to evacuating a city like Houston.
The tricks are getting people to that loading point (without their cars, because you don't have enough parking for what you're trying to do), and getting the trains from that point to out of town without having to cross a flooded area.
Houston has plenty of tracks. I presume it has flat areas next to tracks. Getting out of town without having to cross flooding? I don't know. Enough tracks to hold the traffic that would be needed? Probably not.
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.
Because the cost to not be in it is enormous.
[1] https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...
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
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.
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).
Except the Houston metro area is physically larger than that part of the Netherlands (the populations are close enough to the same).
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 do wonder how long it would actually take to move 3-5 million people ~500 km though. Quite a project.
If each bus made 10 trips, that's still 10K buses.
If you assigned each bus to one of 100 evacuation depots around the city, that's 100 buses per depot.
It would take a remarkable team to manage a depot like that, and you would need 100 such teams. Plus 30K drivers. Plus refueling logistics. Plus pit crews.
"Just put them on buses" is easy to write and enormously hard to pull off.
How many in low lying, flood prone areas?
You think so, eh? What percentage of drivers do you think would show up, given that many of their families would be in danger themselves?