Switzerland is spending millions revamping its vast network of bunkers

I'm pretty sure my shelter is under the grocery store across the street from me but the annoying thing is that they don't tell you where your shelter is until you need it. The locations are somewhat secret. I know the location of another civil shelter farther away with the entrance under a highway because it has signs saying it's a shelter...

When I lived in Washington DC instead of shelters everyone had an assigned route for escaping the city by car.

We have an interesting app here in Switzerland - AlertSwiss. It uses your location to warn you about local dangers, like toxic air from a building fire, to landslides, to bad water warnings... you can also see all alerts in Switzerland on a map of the country. Currently there are a couple of landslides and some fires.

How was escape by road was supposed to work? Wouldn't everyone be stuck in traffic as the bombs were falling?

In a major US city? More a coping mechanism.

I was caught up in an evacuation situation on Hilton Head Island where a hurricane turned unexpectedly and the island was evacuated. We were literally packing up to leave for our scheduled departure, so we were close to the front.

Within 15 minutes, the roads were bonkers. Gas stations were out of gas within an hour, and the traffic was beyond insane took about 3-4 hours to get out.

This was in the Fall in a well connected vacation town, not even peak season. People were not panicking. The police and fire departments were present, prepared and professional.

If it were an initial war scenario, maybe 5% of people would get out, and once electricity was disrupted, the whole thing would immediately freeze.

The Swiss/Finn model is the only credible one and addresses only certain threats. They’re looking at protecting against fallout and conventional bombardment. All of the old US civil defense plans were designed around the notion of Russian bombers attacking US cities with atomic bombs, and said bombers getting intercepted by nuclear SAMs and nuclear air to air rockets. NYC, for example, was ringed with Nike batteries so in a war scenario you’d be looking at fallout (even if every bogey was intercepted) and and a disrupted power grid. It went to the wayside once the Soviets deployed ICBMs and hydrogen bombs.