Addressing the Apologists Part 2: What about the schoolbuses?

Next is an argument that's being pushed by the blame it on the state government crowd.  Well, actually, argument is a bit of an overstatement here.  Because the argument basically consists of a picture.  Albeit, it's a powerful picture...but once that's easy to misinterpret, especially if you're looking to pin blame on the local government.

The AP posted a picture of hundreds of flooded school buses in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  The gist of the argument is that those school buses should have never been in New Orleans, instead being used to take people out of the city to safer locales.  Examples of this argument in action can be seen at Wizbang, Michelle Malkin, and at Little Green Footballs, where they refer to the picture as the "Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool". 

Is this picture a horrible indictment of the local government?   Well, we should first ask if the school buses were being used at all, and if so, what for.

http://www.sltrib.com/nationworld/ci_2982119

As many as 100,000 inner-city residents didn't have the means to leave and an untold number of tourists were stranded by the closing of the airport, so the city arranged buses to take people to 10 last-resort shelters, including the Superdome.

The Baltimore Sun also reports that city officials used sirens and bullhorns to round up as many people as possible into the shelters, presumably using city buses. 

So buses were definitely used in the evacuation process.  However, buses weren't used to take people out of New Orleans, instead sending them to shelters in the city.  Why?

This is a bit of conjecture, but it seems like a simple matter of logistics.  If you're the mayor, you have two options.  The first is to try and evacuate people out of New Orleans with those school buses.  There are plenty of problems with this plan.  First is traffic: with the number of people leaving New Orleans due to the mandatory evacuation, the roads were packed (even with contraflow measures).  Buses that leave late would risk getting caught in the hurricane.  Even buses that left relatively early (24-36 hours before the hurricane hit) would be limited in how far it could get away from Katrina's wrath due to the traffic.  Other potential headaches include running out of gas in a situation where gas shortages were very likely.  Furthermore, once a bus has taken people out of N.O., that bus can't be used to evacuate any other citizens.  With contraflow, it would have been very difficult (if not impossible) to get a bus back in to make a second trip out. 

So instead of evacuating people out of the city, they used buses to move people inside the city to places like the Superdome.  In this system, a bus can be loaded up every time it makes a round trip from the city to the Dome (or some other shelter).  This system allows for more people to make it to safe havens before the hurricane hits, since buses can make more trips.  Also, since these buses are making short trips within the city (instead of longer trips to places like Baton Rouge), they can continue shuttling people as the hurricane gets closer.  If it takes six hours to get a bus to safe haven outside of the city (say Baton Rouge), then the last bus for safe haven must leave at least six hours before the weather starts to get bad.  If it takes a half-hour for a bus to get from a point in the city to the Superdome, then buses can be taking people to safer ground for an extra five hours or so.

If people want to argue that the mayor made a mistake in not using buses to take citizens out of the city, then they need to argue that using buses to take people out of the city is more effective (i.e. would save more lives) than taking them to shelters within the city.  If anyone wants to make that argument, go for it.  But it looks like these arguments are being used for knee-jerk, myopic criticism and little else.