1. Contraflow would have bottle-necked once we got out of Houston/Harris Co if things hadn't been coordinated with the government ahead of time, so what good would it have done without the towns-in-the-evac-route's cooperation. Perhaps if Govenor Perry would have mandated certain routes to be contraflowed until point x, including all small cities along the way, it won't be so difficult next time. One of our neighbors told us that once I-10 had finally been contraflowed, other than getting traffic to the other side, everything went really smooth.
2. 18 wheelers! Everyone I've talked to from my neighborhood commented on the vast amounts of 18 wheelers on the road, some of which broke down or ran out of gas.
Maybe they could come up with some type of formula that "all 18-wheelers not involved with emergency supplies will not be allowed to enter a medium or larger city if they're in a strike zone of a cat3+ hurricane within x number of days (or hours), until a time when the hurricane has shifted to x number of miles of striking that particular city".
3. Country roads with wide shoulders. Many of the routes outside of Houston were two-way roads, but had a shoulder that was as wide as the main lane. We saw quite a few people trying to turn the shoulders into a second lane, but there were line-riders (J. B. Hunt 18 wheeler on 1960 eastbound was the worst I saw) blocking people from trying to use the shoulder as a second lane.
I'm fully aware that bottle-necking would occur at intersections that didn't include the shoulders, but we did see some intersections that DID include the shoulder. So, for the wide-shoulder routes that could be converted to two lanes, the line-riders just slowed things down for everyone (with a few exceptions, most of the wide shoulder routes had fairly level grass easements for the people needing to pull over for whatever reasons).
If these types of routes had been predesignated to be turned into two lanes during emergency evacuations, the press could have informed us which roads were considered two lane routes, and the line-riders might have stopped preventing the flow.
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