Train-the-trainer pilot courses for incident responders and managers.

One of the seven causes of non-recurrent congestion is traffic incidents. Incidents, which include traffic crashes, cargo spills, vehicle breakdowns, and debris in the roadway, are a major cause of unreliability in travel times. Incidents may be related to other significant causes of non-recurrent congestion, including inclement weather, work zones, and malfunctioning traffic control devices. Literature on the causes of congestion by source indicates that incidents (including crashes) may account for more than half of non-recurrent congestion. In addition to their profoundly negative effect on traffic congestion and reliability of travel times, incidents have a very significant safety dimension. Traffic queues caused by incidents often produce secondary crashes; the longer the incident clearance time, the more likely it is that a secondary crash will occur. Poorly managed incident clearance puts motorists at increased crash risk. It also puts traffic incident responders of all types–police, fire and rescue, transportation, emergency medical, towing specialists, and others–at high risk for injury and death. It is no wonder that state transportation agencies and local government agencies are now putting a great deal of effort into improving traffic incident management (TIM) to achieve the goal of safe, quick clearance. This report documents the process used to test and refine the National Traffic Incident Management (TIM) Responder Training curriculum originally developed through SHRP 2 Project L12 so that it could be implemented. The improvement process involved hundreds of responders in four states: Florida, Montana, Tennessee, and Virginia. Over the life of the project, the train-the-trainer course was delivered to a multidisciplinary group of TIM trainers with the results observed by a panel of experts. Between deliveries, hundreds of improvements were made to the course materials. Once the project was completed, the revised curriculum was delivered to the Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation. The course is now being rolled out on a nationwide basis, making this one of the first products of the SHRP 2 program to be implemented. (Author/publisher)