Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think of city mayor's decision not to order a larger scale evacuation. NYT seems to think it was absolutely (their word) the right thing to do. Being on the ground there, would you agree?
The few historical evacuations of >1mil people have often been over the course of 7+days, as well as over very large areas. The only _successful_ evacuation of a major metropolitan area (>3mil) in 20k causalities so it is hard to call that successful.
Example: Street Parade Zurich, attended by about a million people. Virtually all of those people arrive by train immediately before the event, and are gone the next day. Watching > 100k people pour out of a train station in less than an hour is really a spectacle. Remember that Zurich is not a huge city in the first place.
Example: Paris goes on holiday. All-but-literally everybody leaves Paris for summer holiday, pretty much simultaneously. You don't know what an urban evacuation means until you've witnessed this.