Joseph Jones Jr., 61, wore a towel over his head to block the sun. He'd been in line 2½ hours, but wasn't complaining. During Katrina, he had been stranded on a highway overpass.
"I don't like it. Going someplace you don't know, people you don't know," Jones said. "And then when you come back, is your house going to be OK?"
The city had yet to call for a mandatory evacuation, but began ushering out the sick, elderly and those without their own transportation on Saturday. The state has a $7 million contract for more than 700 buses to carry an estimated 30,000 people to shelters.
Many residents said the evacuation was more orderly than Hurricane Katrina, which struck three years ago Friday. But not everyone was happy.
Elizabeth Tell, 67, had been waiting on the corner since 6:30 a.m. for a special needs bus to take her and her dog, Lee Roy, to the station. It was three hours before the first bus a "The problem is, there will be immigration people there and we're all undocumented," Soto said.
Gustav swelled into a major hurricane south of Cuba, with maximum sustained winds near 145 mph, making it the strongest Atlantic storm of 2008. It could strike the U.S. coast anywhere from Mississippi to Texas by Tuesday.
Forecasters said if Gustav follows the projected path it would likely make landfall on Louisiana's central coast, sparing New Orleans a direct hit. But forecasters caution it is still too soon to say exactly where the storm will hit.
"Any little jog could change where it makes landfall," said Karina Castillo, a hurricane support meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center.
One shop along Magazine Street, its windows covered up, showed a flash of New Orleans' storm humor. "Geaux Away Gustav," it read, giving it a French flair.
President Bush called Gulf Coast governors Saturday and told them they would have the full support of the federal government, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
Officials plan to announce a curfew that will mean the arrest of anyone still on the streets after a mandatory evacuation order goes out. Police and National Guardsman will patrol after the storm's arrival, and Gov. Bobby Jindal has said he requested additional search and rescue teams from other states.
Jindal also said the state would likely switch interstate lanes on Sunday so that all traffic would flow north, in the direction an evacuation would follow.
At 11 a.m. EDT, the center of Gustav was about 185 miles east of the western tip of Cuba. The storm had maximum sustained winds of 125 mph, just 6 mph shy of the Category 4 threshold. The center of Gustav was to pass over western Cuba later Saturday and strengthening is forecast after it reaches the Gulf of Mexico.
The second major hurricane of the Atlantic season has already killed 78 people in the Caribbean.
