  Timely evacuation is crucial to disaster response, as people can avoid
suffering and loss of lives when a major disaster happens. With the development
of sharing economy, ridesharing has the advantage of reducing congestion,
saving travel time, and optimizing transportation mode to improve disaster
evacuation efficiency. The paper proposes to integrate the concept of
ridesharing into evacuation and develops a mixed integer programming model for
this problem. A real world case study based on Houston is used to validate the
proposed model. A series of instances are designed to compare the evacuation
efficiency using two indicators, evacuation percentage (EP) and average travel
distance (ATD). Results reveal that increasing the number of vehicles to help
carless individuals might not be the most efficient method in this model.
Moreover, this model offers a specific response strategy based on different
disaster scales, which not only develops a better evacuation plan for the
people but also provides relief agencies insights on resource utilization.
