GIS4903 - Module 1: (Network Analysis) Hurricane Evacuation Reporting

Welcome back to Hurricane Preparedness in ArcGIS.  This week we return to the last part of Project 1: Understanding Network Analyst.  Last week was all about preparing and analyzing the project data originally supplied by UWF.  This week the focus is on using the route lines generated last week to create Project1 deliverables (evacuation maps and hospital evacuation brochure) to support two planned Project1 scenarios: 

1. Evacuating patients from Tampa General Hospital (TGH) to other local Hospitals along with the creation of brochures to help inform patients prepare to evacuate.  
2. Distribution of emergency supplies to U.S. Army National Guard to three storm shelters.  

The route map below is an example from scenario one.  This map is intended to assist hospital patients trying to evacuate TGH for Memorial hospital (MH).   This same map was slightly modified (removed redundant Title) and loaded it into a hospital evacuation brochure template.

The grayscale route maps in this area are from scenario two.  Their intended audience is a person arriving first (first responder) to provide emergency assistance to deliver supplies from a local National Guard Armory to an Emergency Shelter.  These maps are intended to provide an easy to follow street route with clear descriptive directions.  A grayscale basemap was used to follow the theme of reduced complexity.  

Color tends to increase the complexity of a map presentation.  Color (compared to greyscale) is also more expensive to publish.  So there would be added cost saving for creating a mass production grayscale map or brochure as in this hurricane scenario.

In summary, this week was more work than I first anticipated.  The two scenarios ultimately required 5 maps, but more maps were created as working maps that resulted in producing the final maps.  Making the route maps functional with instructions and updated to be followed turn by turn added more time to each deliverable.  Experimenting with grayscale (shades of white/black) maps was interesting for me this week. It allowed me to realize that there are MANY applications where grayscale and color can help map users quickly read an interpret a map.  While the use of too many colors can complicate a map, color information can make a map experience much easier if the number of colors is limited to three (5 max).  Lastly, organizing the data and developing a naming convention to help organize project deliverables is important.  Developing a map template as a requirement would also allow multiple GIS skill team members to disperse the workload and produce consistent looking project deliverables.