Can you discuss the process by which the travel time estimate is arrived at in the Mass Evacuation Transportation Model? In addition to distance, what other features are taken into consideration?
Tom Rich: We struggled with that because, on the one hand, we thought maybe we should just have users specify the travel time they want to use. If you are running this tool in a big city, evacuating 20 hospitals and sending them to 40 others, that is an awful lot of travel times to specify. Instead, we developed a sub-model within the Model for estimating travel time. It takes into account the latitude and longitude of the facilities, so those inputs are required. To develop the sub-model, we obtained point-to-point drive time information from 40 major metropolitan areas in the country from a third-party vendor. The details of this sub-model are described in the Model Description document. I do want to add that there is an input for indicating that the travel time is twice as fast or slow or twice as long, so there is the ability to scale that in the Model.
Related Questions
- How was load time determined in the Mass Evacuation Transportation Model? Are the pre-loaded per patient load times based on previous experience or observations in an exercise?
- Has the use of aircraft been addressed in the Mass Evacuation Transportation Model? What about air evacuation?
- How soon can I travel by airplane or mass transportation?
