ALTERNATIVE SURVEILLANCE CONCEPTS AND METHODS FOR FREEWAY INCIDENT MANAGEMENT-VOLUME 3: COMPUTATIONAL EXAMPLE FOR SELECTING LOW-COST ALTERNATIVES

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 personnel an easy to follow example of the methodology used to conduct freeway incident management analysis. Vols. 1, (RD-77-58) Executive Summary; 2, (RD-77-59) Planning and Trade-Off Analyses for Low-Cost Alternatives; 3, (RD-77-60) Computational Example for Selecting Low-Cost Alternatives; 4, (D-77-61) Guidelines for Specific Low-Cost Alternatives; 5, (RD-77-62) Training Guide for On-Site Incident Management, and 6, (RD-77-63) Delay, Time, and Queue Tables for Trade-Off Analyses. In addition to the final report, an interim report, FHWA-RD-76-111, was prepared entitled Review of Current and Proposed Low-Cost Freeway Incident Management Ssystems. This report presented the state-of-the-art in freeway incident management as of May 1976. /FHWA/