From what I'm reading, opening the freeway to contraflow much earlier would have made it *harder*, not easier to get people out. The buses running people out early were coming back on the other side, prepositioned supplies were using the other side, the fuel tanker trucks were using the other side.
The only thing I saw that went wrong was that too many people bailed earlier than the plan had allowed for, and Texas didn't have time to get resupply to all the gas stations in the area ahead of the wave of evacuees. There was a backup plan in that case, and it worked well - send tanker trucks out as they became available to resupply vehicles on the road and send out buses to distribute water and pick up the stranded.
Nobody got left behind who wanted to go. Not one soul was left stranded on a freeway.
I watched for hours on end, including surfing to TDot's hiway camera site, and there was virtually NIL traffic southbound. That dog won't hunt. All of that inflow could have been handled by secondary roads and higways.
Saying no one was stranded on the freeway as evidenced by the fact that they eventually got off flys in the face of credulity. Thousands of cars were stranded, out of gas, pulled over and pushed off the road, and traffic speed was down to 5mph for over a hundred miles. It took 20 hours to get this situation cleaned up. The governor said as much on national tv both saturday and sunday. But then what does he know.
Further a significant number of people simply pulled off and went back home.
The Politicians in Texas bit the bullet for defects in their plan.
The defect being the human part.
Humans don't evacuate exactly as planned, anymore than they do their Christmas Shopping on time.
Adapting the plan to correspond to human behavior, instead of assuming the plan would be followed across multiple borders, would help.
The exact course of the Hurricane was not predictable, the extent of the flooding, so those towns that went 'early', should not be blamed.
It is impossible at this time to evacuate everyone, especially since many were dealing with 'extra company just in from New Orleans, or Alabama'.
In the end I hope everyone sees too. That in the worst of situations, every arm of the federal government, every state, every city, every town, pitched in to rescue every human and pet life possible.
That is why we are America.
All talk is of loosing this defense, or that situation and becoming a Third world power.
That will only happen when we do not act, as a nation, as we did.
Could things have been better?
Only in the eyes of the MSM.
One cannot change what was going to happen down in NO.
All that happened was that it was exposed and became the proverbial football.
Ever imagined Hillary or Kerry or Bill catching a pass from George Bush?
There are high stakes in this game. They bluffed.
But the storms are not over.
You forget the tens or hundreds of thousands that didn't go because of the nightmare on the roads, or who gave up and came back. Still and all, I believe the single most important thing they need to do is to have enough fuel out on the roads to keep people going. The disabled vehicles probably slowed things down as much as anything.
We have to PAY for LA. so we shouldn't have to sit idly by while some cracker governor makes a botch of the emergency operation.