Household-Level Model for Hurricane Evacuation Destination Type Choice Using Hurricane Ivan Data

Hurricanes are costly natural disasters periodically faced by households in coastal and, to some extent, inland areas. Public agencies must understand household behavior to develop evacuation plans that align with evacuee choices and behavior. This paper presents a previously unknown household-level hurricane evacuation destination type choice model. The discrete choice of destination type is modeled using a nested logit model. Although previous literature considers only houses of friends and relatives and hotels for modeling purposes, this paper incorporates public shelters, churches, and an aggregated destination type denoted other. This research found that the variables influencing this choice include hurricane position at evacuation time, household geographic location, race, income, preparation time, changes in evacuation plans, previous experiences with major hurricanes, household members working during the evacuation, and evacuation notices. The findings of this paper are useful to understand the competition among destination types and how the characteristics of the demand can be used to develop evacuation strategies, such as increasing and/or decreasing use of public shelters, and measuring the effect of evacuation notices in areas with high accessibility to hotels.