Traffic Incident Management Quick Clearance Guidance and Implications (original) (raw)

Improving traffic incident management is one means to help reduce congestion, as traffic incidents account for approximately 25 percent of total congestion on U.S. highways. Between July and September 2012, 330 collisions were recorded for the I-66 corridor in Northern Virginia alone, of which 82 required more than 1 hour to clear. To improve its incident management efforts, the Virginia Department of Transportation’s (VDOT) Northern Region Operations recently piloted a quick clearance policy called Operation Instant Tow. With an instant tow concept, a tow truck and a Virginia State Police trooper are dispatched simultaneously to the site of specific incident types (e.g., lane blocking events), thus reducing clearance time. VDOT’s Operations Division is interested in the potential expansion of this initiative to other operations regions and the employment of other quick clearance initiatives currently not executed in Virginia. The purpose of this study was (1) to investigate traffic...