Most emergency plans assume people can leave.
They assume access to a vehicle, the physical capacity to operate it, the financial resources to fuel it, and the awareness to know when and where to go. They assume someone has a social network capable of coordinating departure, a body capable of tolerating the physical demands of evacuation, and a living situation which permits it. For a significant portion of the population in any given community — those who are elderly, disabled, without vehicles, without English proficiency, without the financial margin to absorb the cost of leaving — these assumptions do not hold.
From a career spent responding to emergencies across multiple systems and multiple geographies, the pattern is consistent. The people who don’t get out in a disaster are rarely the ones who actively choose to stay. The gap between the population the plan was designed for and the population that actually exists in the community is not a logistical oversight. It is a structural one, rooted in the same social determinants of health, which shape chronic disease burden, healthcare access, and economic mobility long before any disaster arrives.
Transportation is not a logistics problem that emerges during a disaster. Instead, it is a social determinant of health that precedes the disaster, shapes who survives it, and determines who recovers afterward. Emergency managers and business continuity professionals who fail to account for it are not planning for the real community. They’re planning for their ideal community.
The Vulnerability That Precedes the Event
The research is unambiguous on this point. A 2023 study examining Hurricane Idalia’s impact on Florida’s Big Bend region found 15% of participants faced transportation insecurity before the hurricane even made landfall, not as a consequence of the storm. It was a baseline condition of their lives. The vulnerability was structural, and the disaster simply revealed it.
This distinction matters enormously for planning purposes. A transportation gap that exists before the event cannot be closed during it. The family without a vehicle on a Tuesday in August does not suddenly acquire one when a mandatory evacuation order is issued on a Wednesday. The elderly resident without a driver’s license or family in the area does not become mobile when the storm makes landfall. The dialysis patient whose medical equipment requires a vehicle with specific accessibility features does not simply find that vehicle in the 48 hours between an evacuation order and a Category 3 hurricane.
Research consistently confirms people from lower-income populations and historically marginalized communities encounter more significant barriers to evacuation, access to emergency resources, and post-disaster recovery. Rural areas experience particular vulnerability with limited road capacity, long travel distances, and the near-total absence of public transportation infrastructure, meaning self-evacuation is often not a realistic option for all residents who want to leave. In the rural systems where I have worked, the patients who presented to EMS in the hours and days after a major weather event were not the patients who had been warned and chosen to ignore the warning. They were the patients the warning system hadn’t reached or weren’t offered any assistance.
Four Points Where Planning Fails
A 2025 scoping review of evacuation and transportation barriers among vulnerable populations identified four consistent failure points in disaster planning. These are findings that align with what practitioners have observed across multiple events.
The first is the immediate transportation barriers during evacuation. Too many people have no vehicle, no accessible transport, no driver, and no information about where to go or how to get there. This is the most visible failure and the most commonly addressed in after-action reports. It is also the most consistently underestimated in pre-event planning, because it requires planners to actively map who cannot self-evacuate, which is a task that demands the integration of demographic data, disability registries, and community knowledge most jurisdictions have not built into their planning processes.
The second is prolonged transportation disruption post-disaster. Evacuation planning tends to focus on departure, but it rarely focuses on return. It often ignores the transportation infrastructure needed to reconnect displaced populations with their communities, healthcare providers, employers, and support systems in the weeks and months after the event. The evacuation is not the end of the transportation problem. For many of the most vulnerable residents, it is the beginning of a displacement crisis that transportation planning did not anticipate and cannot address.
The third is anticipated but unaddressed logistical gaps. Emergency managers are often aware transportation vulnerability exists in their community; they have seen it in previous events, heard it from community organizations, and documented it in after-action reports. The gap between knowledge and action – the identified vulnerability, and the pre-event planning it would address — is where transportation inequity compounds. Knowing the problem exists and not building the infrastructure to address it before the next event is a planning choice with predictable consequences.
The fourth is the inconsistent and inaccessible communication of transportation information during emergencies. Evacuation orders are often issued only in English, distributed through digital channels which require internet access, and timed to a decision-making window that assumes residents have the immediate capacity to act. The people most dependent on external support to leave are the same people who are most likely to receive the information too late, in a format they cannot access, and without the infrastructure that would make acting on it possible.
What Practitioners See That Plans Miss
The social determinants framework applied to transportation vulnerability produces a specific prediction. Communities most at risk from disasters are the same communities where transportation planning has historically underserved, and that prediction is consistent with what emergency responders observe across events and across geographies.
In rural systems with minimal public transit infrastructure and large service areas, the patients who cannot evacuate before a weather event are the same patients who struggle to access routine healthcare, reach a pharmacy, or get to a follow-up appointment in non-disaster conditions. The transportation gap is chronic, not episodic. The disaster makes it acute, but it was always there in the EMS response times, in the delayed presentations, and in the patients who called 911 not because the situation was new but because it had finally reached the threshold where they had no other option.
In urban systems, the transportation vulnerability is concentrated differently but produces the same pattern. The elderly resident in a high-rise without elevator access, the disabled resident whose wheelchair requires a special vehicle, and the low-income household in a flood-prone neighborhood who chose housing near work rather than housing near an evacuation route.
Emergency managers who engage with these communities are not doing social work. They are doing risk management. The communities most likely to generate mass casualties during an event are the communities for which transportation planning has not been properly accounted.
What Better Planning Requires
Three interventions are specific, achievable, and directly applicable to emergency management and business continuity planning.
- Pre-event transportation vulnerability mapping. Every jurisdiction should maintain a registry of residents who cannot self-evacuate. This should be integrated with emergency planning databases, updated regularly, and shared with the agencies responsible for transportation coordination during a disaster. Functional needs registries exist in many jurisdictions. They are inconsistently maintained, inconsistently integrated with transportation planning, and inconsistently used during actual events. Making them standard, mandatory, and operationally connected to evacuation planning is a policy choice which has not yet been made uniformly.
- Pre-negotiated public-private transportation coordination agreements. Paratransit systems, rideshare companies, accessible vehicle providers, and community organizations have assets to supplement public evacuation capacity, but the coordination agreements that allow those assets must exist before the event. A memorandum of understanding signed in the 72 hours before a hurricane makes landfall will not function as designed. The pre-event relationship is the infrastructure. Building it during the event is not an option.
- Post-disaster transportation continuity planning. Recovery planning must explicitly account for the transportation needs of displaced populations at every stage of return and recovery, which includes accessing shelters, reaching healthcare providers, returning to employment, and rebuilding community connections. Transportation is not a phase of disaster response that ends when the evacuation is complete. For the most vulnerable populations, it is a persistent barrier that shapes every aspect of recovery. Plans that do not account for it are plans that will leave the most vulnerable residents behind at every subsequent stage.
Conclusion
Communities most at risk from disasters are the same communities transportation planning has historically underserved. That overlap is not coincidental. It is the product of structural inequities in income, housing, healthcare access, and the built environment social determinants of health framework was designed to name and address.
Emergency managers and business continuity professionals who plan evacuations around the assumption of universal mobility are not effectively planning the next disaster. They are planning for an ideal community that doesn’t face these issues. Closing the gap between those two requires planning not assumption. The road out exists for some residents of every community. Effective disaster planning requires knowing who it doesn’t reach, why, and what it will take to get there before the next event makes the answer unavoidable.
