Wildfire evacuation routes in single-egress mountain communities create fatal traffic bottlenecks because road networks were designed for daily commuting, not mass simultaneous departure

Residents of wildland-urban interface communities built along canyons, ridgelines, and mountain roads face deadly traffic jams during wildfire evacuations because many neighborhoods have only one or two narrow exit roads that funnel thousands of vehicles into the same chokepoints simultaneously. In the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, 27,000 residents attempted to evacuate through a road network designed for normal daily traffic, and at least 10 people were found dead in or near their vehicles. In Lahaina, Maui in August 2023, blocked roads and downed power poles created what the Los Angeles Times called 'surely the deadliest traffic jam in U.S. history,' with more than two dozen victims found on or near Kuhua Street. Why it matters: Residents who follow evacuation orders still die in their vehicles because traffic gridlock traps them in the fire's path, so public trust in evacuation orders erodes and people choose to shelter in place (which is even more dangerous in most WUI fires), so emergency management agencies face impossible triage decisions about evacuation zone sequencing, so future wildfire deaths increase as climate-driven fire behavior outpaces the road infrastructure's evacuation capacity, so governments face massive wrongful death liability (Maui County and the State of Hawaii faced billions in lawsuits after Lahaina). The structural root cause is that land use planning and subdivision approvals in fire-prone areas historically required road networks only sufficient for daily traffic capacity and standard emergency response (single structure fires, medical calls), not for the simultaneous evacuation of entire communities, and retrofitting additional egress routes through mountainous or canyon terrain is prohibitively expensive and faces environmental review barriers under CEQA and NEPA.