oudeis wrote:
>
> Basically, this is a rather ignorant analysis since they already
> _have_ organized evacuation routes.
That's the problem. They have organized the evacuation routes -- AND IT IS NOT WORKING.
Turn on your TV set Kelley. And perhaps you should also start browsing in _Nature_; here is Les Schaffer's comments on J's post:
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Marxism] U.S. emergency plans: a disaster waiting to happen Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 10:46:30 -0400 From: Les Schaffer <schaffer at optonline.net>
Joaquín Bustelo wrote: This result was easily foreseeable. Traffic engineers will tell you that a highway with so many lanes only has so much capacity at a given speed, a number of vehicles per hour.
you have no idea how many papers and conferences and research grants have looked at the highway traffic problem, particularly in terms of large-scale evacuation plans. yet when it comes time to evacuate a metropolitan area, the best that happens is free-for-all as J describes. This reminds me of the accuracy of the storm surge model predictions prior to NO/Katrina, that of course went unheeded.
Interestingly, there was an article in a followup edition of Nature magazine where scientific researchers wondered aloud whether they really could avoid politics in their work. after all, the article proclaimed, if science people do all this good work (storm surge models, etc), publish it, and it never gets used, whats the value of the science? Though this type of reasoning is invariably limited to "politics" == "lobbying Congress", it does point to a theory/practice split that is prevalent in US and elsewhere in the sciences and engineering and is only barely being addressed by academics.
les schaffer
example models:
http://www.geog.utah.edu/~cova/cova-johnson-2003.pdf http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps300/fall01/handouts/mcm.2001.entry.pdf