That said, I know a scenario like that would never happen, probably for the best.
There might be some level of adoption where they would, but honestly we're back to "but what about trains/trucks?".
Half the problem with evacuations is people don't want to leave behind their stuff to get destroyed. You'd basically be better off getting a fleet of semi's with some quick and dirty cube system thrown up than a bunch of automated sedans.
I've never lived in a hurricane area, but when I think of news coverage of problematic evacuations, they're showing people stuck on highways, not people stuck in urban traffic grids.
It's a throughput problem. Computer controlled "car trains" with shorter following distances can boost traffic throughput, but I don't think that would be enough to make evacuation of large cities actually feasible. The highway system is simply not built for that use case. Especially since evacuation often occurs during inclement weather that reduces capacity.
AFAIK, most places try to figure out how to make shelter in place work, because mass evacuation is likely to end up with many people facing the weather event while on the highway.
You could theoretically do better with busses and trains, things, but there's likely not enough busses that are setup for long distance travel available: lots of municipal bus fleets are setup for alternate fuels which is great for emissions but makes it hard to travel to a neighboring state, because there may not be appropriate fueling opportunities on the way. Etc, etc.
Do other states not do this?
With computers driving: traffic light turns green. All cars simultaneously start driving. It'd be like a train but without the efficiency.
Similarly, with human drivers: some jackasses drive into the box and the light turns red. Now perpendicular traffic is either fully blocked or must proceeed slower to maneuver around the jackasses. With computer drivers, they shouldn't intentionally break the law and they should have plenty of sensors to figure out that they cannot make it through the box.
Imagine a busy intersection where all the cars fly past one another at 40 miles an hour without stopping but none of them crash. Humans can't do this, but machines could, if, and when the technology gets there. To be clear, there's still a way to go.
Also, this already exists in some places. Look at a video of how to cross the street as a pedestrian in Vietnam: You literally just start walking across and people weave around you. Or look at driving in India and similar places.
All I'm saying is never say never
If you want to write with such confidence perhaps you should share what the lottery numbers are?
Yep, here in Chicago you might even go as many as 12 hours between such events
Most traffic jams are caused by accidents or people slamming the brakes
I don't know that you'd ever see this in practice, but it's much more practical in theory for almost identical machines running the same software than for a bunch of humans in a variety of vehicles who've maybe only half understood how to do this.
Also, for this specific problem we know humans are idiots. They should all be driving an agreed route to the agreed evacuation point, but some real humans will decide they know a shortcut, they want to drop past Jim's place, or whatever. Just as there's a difference between what the protocol says happens when you have to abandon an aircraft on the tarmac versus the reality that people will decide they want to self-evacuate and they need their carry on bags and chaos ensues and maybe people die.
But in the future, if there is a coordination standard among driverless cars, that could allow much higher density at higher speed. Coordination standards + higher density of self driving should reduce the self driving cars doing random shit too.
This is a big assumption.
This requires that all cars are self-driving cars capable of complex reasoning on in-car compute without relying on network connection, as network connections can't be assumed reliable in hurricane conditions.
At which point we've reinvented privatized buses with a last mile convenience vs greatly reduced throughput trade-off.
I agree, but there are a number of people here in Florida who will do it or die trying (emphasis on the die trying)