Over the past 20 years, traffic on Danish roads has increased by approx. 70 %, particularly in and around Copenhagen and other larger cities, causing congestion and considerable delays during peak hours. Calculations haveshown that in the metropolitan area of Copenhagen, congestions incur extra time costs of a total of EUR 750 million, annually. Therefore, the road authorities have put extra attention on identifying the causes for delays.The finding is that during the rush hour, the traffic circulation is verysensitive and even minor single incidents on the roads can cause instant congestion. As serious accidents are frequent and time consuming incidents, the Danish Road Directorate investigated the congestion costs caused by these accidents. First, the project will elaborate an overview and quantify the amount of waiting time, extra travel time and extra kilometres due to detours caused by severe accidents. The results are expected to be used as background for decisions on prioritization of mitigation measures. For this purpose a model based on observed accidents and traffic amounts calibrated with real time registration of travel time was developed. The real time registrations used to calibrate the model will be combination of data from road side system for travel time measurements and GPS data from a fleet of trucks logging their GPS positions every five seconds. Second, the project will estimate how the extra travel time and kilometres can be quantified in terms of socioeconomic costs. A possible outcome could be a policy and action plan for minimising the impact on e.g. extra travel time caused by road accidents. The actions could be all from campaigns with the goal of better cooperation between police and rescue workers, to campaigns towards the daily users of the road and thereby state how to behave when a accidents occurs to including these costs in the cost-benefit analyses of accident reducing measures. Thereby, both the accident costs and the avoided congestion cost form part of the evaluation of the impact of such measures. For the covering abstract see ITRD E145999
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