The impact of the 1994 Northridge earthquake on Los Angeles motorists

The January 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged parts of four major freeways in the Los Angeles area, including the Santa Monica Freeway, the world's busiest. While the long term effects of this damage remain to be seen, the shape of the Los Angeles metropolitan area and the behavior of its residents were, for a while, substantially impacted. In this study, five hundred motorists, many of whom were displaced from the damaged Santa Monica Freeway, responded to a mailed questionnaire. This questionnaire asked about changes in travel patterns, factors affecting alternate route choice, wayfinding strategies used, difficulty in following alternate routes, attitudes toward the neighborhoods containing alternate routes, and attitudinal changes regarding the risk of traveling city freeways. The data are analyzed using a variety of methods in order to generalize motorists' impressions and behavior when forced to abandon customary routes in the event of a disaster. These methods include some initial descriptive statistics, a factor analysis of the coded responses, Protocol Analysis of the open-ended responses, and visual analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The results of the analysis are examined within the context of an integrative framework for studying natural hazards, but tempered by a theory of social geography. Such a framework allows the micro-level data described above to be viewed from a macro-level perspective and vice versa, thus emphasizing the importance of both the individual and society in suggesting appropriate and sensitive hazard mitigation policies. The research described here, therefore, is concerned with explaining why the aforementioned motorists and neighborhoods affected by the earthquake damage to the Santa Monica Freeway have developed these responses and how these responses may impact Los Angeles.