Citation

Chou CS, Miller-Hooks E. J. Transp. Res. Forum 2009; 48(3): 97-118.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Transportation Research Forum)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Traffic incident management (TIM) programs attempt to mitigate the impact of incidents through quick responses. TIM programs recently have been the target of state budget cuts, therefore making it important to demonstrate that the benefits of such programs outweigh the costs. This paper proposes a three-stage time-saving process for conducting traffic incident management (TIM) program benefit evaluation in which simulation is applied to assess travel delay savings. This process relies on a developed property-based incident generation procedure designed to assist in generating a set of incident scenarios that are representative of the historical incident data set and simultaneously not overly large in number so as not to be computationally burdensome. The proposed procedure was applied in evaluating the benefits of an existing TIM program, a freeway service patrol program in New York State, for the purpose of assessing the proposed procedure's predictive power. Results of the experiment show that the proposed procedure results in benefit estimates within 5% of the value derived employing all historical incidents and with an 82% savings in simulation run time.