Managing traffic during nonrecurring congestion

Abstract

Studies by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and several states show that more than half of urban freeway congestion is caused by incidents. In nonurban areas, nearly all traffic congestion can be attributed to incidents, special events, or construction and maintenance activities. The cost of this congestion is enormous, not only in terms of the billions of dollars in costs that can be measured, such as vehicle-hours of delay and wasted fuel, but also in terms of the indirect costs that can't be accurately measured, such as higher vehicle emissions, more accidents and higher insurance premiums. Effective incident management involves a coordinated, cooperative, systematic approach among all the agencies involved to reduce the time it takes to detect and verify an incident has occurred, mount the appropriate response, clear the incident, and manage traffic until normal conditions are restored. These steps occur for every incident regardless of whether, or how well, they are manage. This paper reports that the objective of an incident management system is to improve the efficiency of the existing response to reduce the duration, and thus the impact, of each incident.