  Hurricanes are costly natural disasters periodically faced by households in
coastal and to some extent, inland areas. A detailed understanding of
evacuation behavior is fundamental to the development of efficient emergency
plans. Once a household decides to evacuate, a key behavioral issue is the time
at which individuals depart to reach their destination. An accurate estimation
of evacuation departure time is useful to predict evacuation demand over time
and develop effective evacuation strategies. In addition, the time it takes for
evacuees to reach their preferred destinations is important. A holistic
understanding of the factors that affect travel time is useful to emergency
officials in controlling road traffic and helps in preventing adverse
conditions like traffic jams. Past studies suggest that departure time and
travel time can be related. Hence, an important question arises whether there
is an interdependence between evacuation departure time and travel time? Does
departing close to the landfall increases the possibility of traveling short
distances? Are people more likely to depart early when destined to longer
distances? In this study, we present a model to jointly estimate departure and
travel times during hurricane evacuations. Empirical results underscore the
importance of accommodating an inter-relationship among these dimensions of
evacuation behavior. This paper also attempts to empirically investigate the
influence of social ties of individuals on joint estimation of evacuation
departure and travel times. Survey data from Hurricane Sandy is used for
computing empirical results. Results indicate significant role of social
networks in addition to other key factors on evacuation departure and travel
times during hurricanes.
