Experience has shown that at traffic incident scenes, safety and operations can be improved if good on-site traffic management is used. Motorists lose about 750 million vehicle-hours per year while waiting for incidents to be removed, and over 2 million accidents per year occur on urban freeways alone. This research study identifies low-cost incident management systems for responding to freeway disturbances. Emphasis is placed on the development of pre-planned response techniques, candidate jurisdictional agreements, traffic operational procedures for incident sites, and overall improvement of freeway incident management. This volume of the report has been developed to give police, highway, and traffic engineering administrators a conceptual understanding of the issues surrounding freeway incident management in less than an hour of reading time.
Abstract