Disturbances caused by breakdowns, cargo losses and accidents significantly affect the safe and fluent road traffic on motorways and lead to frequent area-covering consequences. Therefore the fast and exact localisation of incidents is an essential condition for the fast and targeted operation of assistance and the release of further actions, e.g. hazard warnings. For the majority of the non-automatically producible incident reports the localisation by a distinct, recognizable and for all traffic participants intuitively comprehensible static signage is considered the most suitable. The signs are denoted as localisation-boards. Their development and proving took place in a pilot project on motorways in Hamburg, Germany. The boards display the motorway number, the direction of traffic and the kilometres of track and are placed on the open road at intervals of 500 metres. Further information are given in motorway interchanges and in the vicinity of bridges. The efficacy of the new signboards was surveyed by incoming emergency calls at the police office of Hamburg, before and after the placement of the signs, and also with an online-survey of traffic participants. The experiences of the operation leaders played a major role in this process. The majority of the incident reports were made by passing drivers and concerned apart from accidents especially damaged vehicles and other hazard warnings, which lead to police operations. These emergency calls will also continue to be supported by the application of localisation-boards in the future. The results of the research project revealed an increasing acceptance of the localisation-boards by the traffic participants and the staff of the police offices. Nevertheless for a durable, faster and more exact localisation of incidents with the help of localisation-boards, a permanent internal and external communication concerning the purpose and content of the signboards will be needed. (Author/publisher)
Abstract