Traffic Incident Management Quick Clearance Guidance and Implications (original) (raw)
Related papers
Incident Management via Courtesy Patrol: Evaluation of a Pilot Program in Colorado
Transportation Research Record, 1995
A courtesy patrol program was operated by the Colorado Department of Transportation on urban freeways during peak periods to reduce congestion attributable to incidents. In this article are described the program's implementation using two approaches to service delivery, the types of incidents encountered, services provided, and impacts on traffic flows. During the pilot program, the duration of incidents was reduced by 8.6 to 10.5 min. Using a deterministic queuing model, average delays were estimated to be reduced by 71to98 vehicle-hr per incident, depending on roadway position, time of day, and assumptions regarding lane blockage effects. The program's benefits far exceeded its costs. The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) initiated a courtesy patrol program on a pilot basis in the summer of 1992 to provide incident management on major roadways during rush hour periods, with the goal of reducing congestion. This article is drawn from a larger evaluation (J) and includes reports on program implementation,, incident type, service levels, and program effectiveness. PROGRAM APPROACH AND IMPLEMENTATION Congestion and Incident Management Congestion is an increasingly serious problem. Nationally, congestion on urban freeways is responsible for as much as 2 billion vehicle-hr of delay and $16 billion in costs (2). In addition, congestion contributes to poor air quality, wasted fuel, and accidents. While some amount of congestion stems simply from traffic volumes exceeding roadway capacity, studies have shown that incidents-vehicle breakdowns and accidents on or along the road-account for as much as 60 percent of all congestion. Incidents include major accidents that tie up several lanes for hours; minor accidents and stalled vehicles that block only one lane for short durations; vehicles stopped in shoulders; spilled loads; construction, utility, and maintenance activities; and special events that generate heavy traffic volumes (3). According to a Federal Highway Administration report (3), incidents blocking one lane of a three-lane road will reduce capacity by almost half. Even an incident on the shoulder that does not physically block a lane, such as a stalled vehicle or a law enforcement stop, can cause a 25 percent capacity reduction. Capacity reductions occur even when lanes are not blocked, due to the "gawking" effect,
Traffic Incident Management Performance Measures: Ranking Agencies on Roadway Clearance Time
Journal of Transportation Technologies
This study develops a procedure to rank agencies based on their incident responses using roadway clearance times for crashes. This analysis is not intended to grade agencies but to assist in identifying agencies requiring more training or resources for incident management. Previous NCHRP reports discussed usage of different factors including incident severity, roadway characteristics, number of lanes involved and time of incident separately for estimating the performance. However, it does not tell us how to incorporate all the factors at the same time. Thus, this study aims to account for multiple factors to ensure fair comparisons. This study used 149,174 crashes from Iowa that occurred from 2018 to 2021. A Tobit regression model was used to find the effect of different variables on roadway clearance time. Variables that cannot be controlled directly by agencies such as crash severity, roadway type, weather conditions, lighting conditions, etc., were included in the analysis as it helps to reduce bias in the ranking procedure. Then clearance time of each crash is normalized into a base condition using the regression coefficients. The normalization makes the process more efficient as the effect of uncontrollable factors has already been mitigated. Finally, the agencies were ranked by their average normalized roadway clearance time. This ranking process allows agencies to track their performance of previous crashes, can be used in identifying low performing agencies that could use additional resources and training, and can be used to identify high performing agencies to recognize for their efforts and performance.
Operational impacts of incident quick clearance legislation: a simulation analysis
2012
Many states in the US have enacted quick clearance laws requiring drivers of vehicles involved in minor incidents to move their vehicles from travel lanes prior to the arrival of first responders. Since little is known about the effectiveness of these laws, this research sought to find the benefit-cost ratio of advertising quick clearance legislation to improve driver compliance, and compare it with benefit-cost ratios of other incident management strategies, particularly traffic cameras, freeway service patrols, and traffic sensors. The analysis used traffic simulation that applied application programming interfaces to produce random spatial and temporal occurrence of incidents, including incident start times, durations, and locations, based on normal distributions developed from field data, to test before and after the law scenarios. The results provide decision makers with support for prioritizing funding between these incident management strategies and indicated that investments in the advertisement of this law was beneficial.
Facilitating Incident Management Strategies on Freeways
1999
Traffic incidents on Texas' urban highways are becoming an increasing source of delay, congestion, safety problems, and poor air quality. An effective incident management program can significantly reduce the effects of incidents on freeways. Many incident management strategies are dependent upon some aspect of geometric design. For example, the travel time required for emergency vehicles to reach the site of the incident is affected by accessibility to the incident. Providing freeway features such as emergency crossovers, median barrier gates, or refuge areas may enable emergency personnel to respond to the incident in a more safe and timely manner. The objective of this research project was to develop geometric design guidelines to accommodate incident management strategies. The research team's approach to this project included a review of existing literature, a survey of those involved in incident management, and on-site visits to existing locations that have implemented c...
2016
The NCDOT's IMAP program provides a critically important service to North Carolina's traveling public. The highly trained and well-equipped IMAP operators protect motorist safety while minimizing congestion and improving system reliability. While the costs of deploying IMAP routes are not trivial, the benefits are tangible and significant for locations where the patrols are truly needed. Therefore, it is essential that the NCDOT have appropriate and effective tools and methodologies for evaluating the costs and benefits of existing and potential IMAP deployments and for prioritizing route expansion alternatives. The NCDOT has operated a highly successful and expanding IMAP program over the last two decades. Demand for continued system expansion is coming up against trends in budget tightening and workforce downsizing. The trends are nationwide and have fueled a parallel trend toward private operation of freeway service patrols. These trends in service patrol deployment and service delivery have been accompanied by a sustained national and international research thrusts providing important implementable findings in transportation system modeling and experimental knowledge in the safety and efficiency improvements that can be achieved through the provision of freeway service patrols. Therefore, in pursuing this research project, NCDOT desired a synthesis of lessons learned and best practices as well as development of a methodology to incorporate this knowledge, along with applicable recent research findings, into a process that will enable criteria-based selection and prioritization of future IMAP system expansion. The project outcomes have addressed these needs.
Journal of Advanced Transportation
Freeway service patrol (FSPs) programs have been considered as an effective tool for traffic incident management in minimizing the adverse effects of traffic incidents. In this study, random parameters hazard-based duration modeling method was used to evaluate the impact of the newly implemented Alabama Service and Assistance Patrol (ASAP) program, using incident clearance time as a performance measure. It was determined that there is a statistically significant difference in the factors that influence incidents clearance times between incidents that occurred inside and outside the ASAP regions. A total of five variables (on-road, nighttime, peak hours, rain, and fire response present) were observed to have random effects along with ten fixed effects variables on incidents occurring inside the ASAP regions. On the other hand, incidents that occurred outside the ASAP regions were found to have three random effects variables (on-road, nighttime, and fire response present) and seven fi...
2016
The NCDOT's IMAP program provides a critically important service to North Carolina's traveling public. The highly trained and well-equipped IMAP operators protect motorist safety while minimizing congestion and improving system reliability. While the costs of deploying IMAP routes are not trivial, the benefits are tangible and significant for locations where the patrols are truly needed. Therefore, it is essential that the NCDOT have appropriate and effective tools and methodologies for evaluating the costs and benefits of existing and potential IMAP deployments and for prioritizing route expansion alternatives. The NCDOT has operated a highly successful and expanding IMAP program over the last two decades. Demand for continued system expansion is coming up against trends in budget tightening and workforce downsizing. The trends are nationwide and have fueled a parallel trend toward private operation of freeway service patrols. These trends in service patrol deployment and service delivery have been accompanied by a sustained national and international research thrusts providing important implementable findings in transportation system modeling and experimental knowledge in the safety and efficiency improvements that can be achieved through the provision of freeway service patrols. Therefore, in pursuing this research project, NCDOT desired a synthesis of lessons learned and best practices as well as development of a methodology to incorporate this knowledge, along with applicable recent research findings, into a process that will enable criteria-based selection and prioritization of future IMAP system expansion. The project outcomes have addressed these needs.
Making the Connection: Advancing Traffic Incident Management in Transportation Planning: A Primer
2013
The intent of this primer is to inform and guide traffic incident management (TIM) professionals and transportation planners to initiate and develop collaborative relationships and advance TIM programs through the metropolitan planning process. The primer aims to inspire planners and TIM professionals to create transportation plans and programs that support regional TIM programs through TIM-focused objectives, performance measures, and TIM strategies and projects. The ultimate goal of this primer is to strengthen, support, and elevate regional TIM programs as a crucial, lower-cost strategy for reliability, safety, environmental improvements, and mobility. The primer explains the benefits for TIM professionals and planners of linking planning and TIM. It contains specific opportunities, supported by case studies, to integrate TIM considerations and stakeholders into the planning process. TIM planning sheets provide tangible examples of TIM objectives that can be drawn from, in whole ...
Developing a tool to help highway patrol in allocating resources to crashes
In recent years, the United States has experienced significant growth in the amount of freight transported by truck, and this is expected to increase in future. Collisions involving trucks have some of the greatest ramifications and are associated with economic and societal costs. The state of Wyoming has one of the highest rates of crashes involving trucks in the country. The Wyoming Highway Patrol puts a substantial amount of its resources into enforcing commercial vehicle inspections and traffic laws in the state. Because of the heavy truck traffic on Interstate 80 (I-80), the much of the Wyoming Highway Patrol's resources are utilized in patrolling and performing inspections there. Because of this intensive truck corridor, the Wyoming Highway Patrol may not be focusing resources on other locations throughout the state. The Wyoming Department of Transportation and the Wyoming Highway Patrol jointly selected three zones throughout the state of Wyoming based on high truck traffic areas. Historical statewide crash data and statewide citations issued by the Wyoming Highway Patrol in these zones are analyzed in this study. The relationship between the numbers of citations issued along the studied route and the number of crashes that occurred is investigated in this article. Statistical analysis using ordinal least squares on I25 indicates that, on a monthly scale, the number of citations is a preventive measure for the number of crashes. Spatial temporal analysis on I25 showed that although Wyoming Highway Patrol resources are allocated to locations with the greatest number of crashes, it needs to allocate more resources on I25 north between midnight and 6 a.m. This study provides the Wyoming Highway Patrol with information regarding where more enforcement may be needed within other areas in the state of Wyoming.
Traffic Incident Management State of the Art Review
2011
The contents of this report reflect the views of the authors, who are responsible for the facts and the accuracy of the information presented. This document is disseminated under the sponsorship of the Department of Transportation, University Transportation Centers Program, in the interest of information exchange. The U.S. Government assumes no liability of the contents or use thereof.