Reducing Incident-Caused

Congestion

Incidents—including accidents—are responsible for a large

share of all traffic congestion. Therefore, reducing the num-
ber of incidents and better controlling the impacts of those
that occur could decrease congestion significantly.

Coping with Incident-Caused Traffic Congestion

Many strategies and tactics have been suggested for coping
with incident-caused traffic congestion. Analyzing all of
them in detail is not within the scope of this book. How-
ever, the most significant are listed in the following para-
graphs to illustrate the variety of possible approaches.

Improving the Physical Design of Existing Roadways

This strategy includes the following tactics to reduce the
probability of accidents:
—Redesigning entrance and exit ramps to reduce the
severity of their curves (which often cause trucks exiting
too fast to overturn);
—Building barriers separating flows of traffic moving in
opposite directions adjacent to each other;
—Creating more gradual curves on existing roadways;

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—Widening lanes on roadways with very narrow lanes;

—On roads containing short segments with fewer lanes than the rest
of those roads, ending those bottlenecks by widening them to match the
width elsewhere;
—Building more cloverleaf and other nonconfrontational inter-
changes at intersections of major roads;
—Replacing existing two-lane roads with four-or-more-lane roads,
preferably with divided segments for traffic moving in opposite direc-
tions. The fatality rate on two-lane roads is more than double that on
four-lane roads, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA).1
—Providing ample shoulders—preferably paved—along all feasible
portions of major roadways so that vehicles becoming disabled can be
quickly removed from traffic lanes.

Coordinating Traffic Flows Better

The following tactics, by controlling signal systems on ramps, arteri-
als, or streets, can better coordinate traffic flows:
—Instituting ramp metering on major expressways during peak
hours;
—Installing systems for coordinating traffic lights along arterial
streets to expedite smoother traffic flows. For example, in the Dallas
area, six local governments were operating 224 uncoordinated traffic
signals along a single transportation corridor. After major negotiations,
they agreed to treat the whole corridor as a unified system and operate
all the signals under one control plan. The results were described by one
evaluator as follows:
Travel time in the corridor has been reduced by six percent, vehicle
delay time has been reduced by 34 percent, and stops have been
reduced by 43 percent. The estimated reduction in fuel consump-
tion and emissions is approximately 5 percent, and the estimated
annual benefits are $26 million at a cost of $4 million. I think one
of the real benefits of the project is that it showed that Dallas
County could undertake a multi-jurisdictional effort and that the
County and the six cities with differing goals and priorities could
work cooperatively. As a result, the next bond election extended
the program to other parts of the County and established $4 mil-
lion in seed funding for an incident response center.2
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—On minor streets crossing major roadways, using traffic signals

activated only when vehicles are waiting on the minor streets to mini-
mize stopping major traffic flows;
—Installing “smart card” systems with fast throughput lanes on
major toll roads in order to speed movement of vehicles with “smart
cards” through toll gates;
—Using lane control signals to control the direction of traffic flows
on reversible lanes that can be altered to suit regular time-of-day shifts
in vehicle movements.

Providing Better Information about Current Congestion Conditions

—Creating programmable electronic overhead signs warning
motorists of congestion ahead so they can slow down and divert to
alternate routes.
—Broadcasting up-to-date bulletins about traffic conditions over
radio stations that drivers can listen to while traveling. This requires
some real-time means of collecting and analyzing information about
current conditions.
—Maintaining Internet sites featuring current congestion conditions
and weather conditions that drivers can consult before leaving on com-
muting or other trips.
—Creating more prominent signs announcing work zones and signals
designed to slow traffic going through work zones, which have high
worker injury rates.

Conducting Educational Campaigns against Driving under the Influence

of Alcohol or Drugs
Education campaigns can be carried out as follows:
—Employing speakers to tour high schools and present realistically
graphic views of the results of accidents caused by driving under the
influence.
—Adopting relatively stringent laws imposing heavy fines and losses
of licenses on drivers who are convicted of driving under the influence.
—Insofar as it is legal, conducting random but well-publicized stop-
and-check sweeps on drivers in high-accident corridors to test their
sobriety.
—Publishing the names in prominent media of all persons found driv-
ing under the influence.
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More Rigorously Enforcing Existing Traffic Laws

Traffic laws are probably the most frequently violated ordinances in
American society, but they can be enforced by the following strategies:
—Setting speed limits at realistic levels rather than so low that most
drivers are sure to ignore them.
—Using recording cameras at major intersections to identify drivers
who run red lights and following up by mail with heavy fines and loss of
licenses for those who do not pay them. This tactic has been employed
successfully in Australia and is beginning to be used in American cities.
The Federal Highway Administration has stated that running red lights
causes more than 80,000 crashes per year and results in more than
80,000 injuries and nearly 1,000 deaths annually.3
—Installing along busy streets speed-limit-reporting signs that show
passing vehicles how fast they are going. Experience shows that such
signs may reduce driver speeds at least temporarily, especially in school
zones.
—Installing “traffic calming” devices on residential streets used as
through streets to slow down excessively speeding drivers. These include
speed bumps, barriers creating dead ends on residential streets, traffic
circles, and narrowed lanes.
—More effectively enforcing speed limits in areas that have given rise
to numerous accidents through greater use of patrol cars and frequent
arrests. Unfortunately, such higher-intensity enforcement is difficult to
sustain. As the Transportation Research Board said in its exhaustive
1998 study:

The problem with traditional enforcement methods is their short-

lived effect in deterring noncompliers. Extending the effect typi-
cally requires a level of enforcement intensity that exceeds the
resources provided to the police for speed enforcement and other
priorities. Policymakers can increase the resources directed toward
speed enforcement, but providing adequate enforcement levels is
expensive.4

Creating Traffic Management Centers

These centers would collect and disseminate information about cur-
rent traffic conditions and coordinate the dispatch of repair, rescue, and
removal vehicles to scenes of traffic accidents.
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Creating and Operating Traffic Management Centers

In the past decade, dozens of state and local governments have created
formal traffic management centers (TMCs) to help reduce the negative
impacts of traffic congestion on safety, environmental pollution, and
travel convenience. An excellent example of a TMC is the one operated
by the Maryland Coordinated Highways Action Response Team
(CHART), which is a joint effort of the Maryland Department of Trans-
portation and the Maryland State Police.5 The headquarters is located
in a large, specially designed building just south of the Baltimore-
Washington International Airport. This center is a roomy high-ceiling
combat-information-center-type room with five huge television screens
and twelve smaller ones deployed on the walls. Eight major and many
more minor computer consoles are arranged in a semicircle in front of
these screens. The team operates fifty or so closed-circuit television cam-
eras mounted along the major highways within its jurisdiction. These
cameras are placed at key points on those highways and can be moved
and zoomed from this spot. The real-time pictures from these cameras
can be tuned into computer consoles and projected on the wall screens
as desired. The center also receives vehicle speed data every five minutes
from a large number of electronic detection loops buried at key points
along the highways it monitors. Thus operators of the CHART Opera-
tions Center can instantly check on current conditions at many points
along the roads they are supposed to monitor. Moreover, they are in
continual direct radio and telephone contact with all other state and
local agencies relevant to traffic flows. The center also controls eight
assistance vehicles that roam these highways during peak hours—four in
the Washington area and four in the Baltimore area. They assist
motorists in trouble and help clear any lane blockages caused by acci-
dents or other incidents.
This center is open twenty-four hours a day. Alvin Marquess, the
operations manager as of December 2003, had been with the program
from its inception. He was obviously intimately familiar with, and a
strong proponent of, its activities. The CHART program was founded in
the mid-1980s, opened a Baltimore-oriented branch in 1990, and moved
into its present modern quarters in 1994. Its “war room” is most inten-
sively manned during emergency events such as major snowstorms, big
athletic events, and other unusual situations. There are two outlying
operations centers in police headquarters near the Washington and Bal-
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timore beltways, and smaller branch operations at the two major foot-
ball stadiums in Washington and Baltimore. In summer 2001, CHART
had about fifty persons assigned to it and was under the jurisdiction of
the Maryland Highway Department.
The main goals of this operation and almost all others like it are to
keep the traffic flowing on major roadways, mainly by removing lane-
blocking incidents as quickly as possible, and to promote safer condi-
tions on those roadways. Achieving these goals effectively requires at
least five major activities.
The most important TMC activity is arranging for close cooperation
and coordination among the many state, local, and private agencies con-
cerned with maintaining efficient traffic flows. Four major types of
agencies work with CHART: the state police (and some local police
departments), local fire departments, many public and private medical
agencies, and state environmental departments. The last are mainly con-
cerned with cleaning up spills of various hazardous substances. Estab-
lishing initial liaisons with these agencies, working out protocols for
which ones have which responsibilities at the scenes of accidents and
other incidents, continuously communicating current conditions and
needs to all these agencies, and revising the protocols among them as
experience indicates is necessary are crucial ingredients in operating an
effective TMC. Maryland’s CHART works more closely with the state
police than local police departments because its jurisdiction consists
mainly of interstate highways under the operational control of the state
police.
Sustaining effective coordination of all the relevant agencies over long
time periods is particularly difficult for three reasons. First, each of the
many agencies involved receives its resources from a different annual
budget and must continue to allocate enough of each year’s budget to
incident management to remain an effective participant—in spite of
many competing demands for those limited resources. Second, all agen-
cies experience continual changes in personnel. This causes frequent
losses of today’s most effective proponents and most experienced practi-
tioners of incident management. Personnel changes also create a recur-
rent need to persuade newcomers that incident management is an
important function for their agency. Third, constant changes in technol-
ogy—such as increased use of cell phones to report incidents—plus
innovations in response procedures, make it necessary to continually
revise the basic protocols among agencies about who should do what to
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whom and when. Yet such negotiations are always delicate because of
the inherent tendency among bureaucrats—public and private—to “pro-
tect their own turf.” Thus the author of an exhaustive analysis of free-
way, incident, and emergency management stated, “Incident manage-
ment’s greatest challenge has been in institutional integration (i.e., in
integrating incident management into the mainstream transportation
planning and programming processes and in integrating incident man-
agement programs across jurisdictional boundaries).”6
A second critical activity of every TMC is installing, maintaining, and
monitoring electronic surveillance devices that provide a continuous pic-
ture of conditions on those roads within its jurisdiction. As previously
noted, these consist mainly of remote television cameras mounted along
these roadways and controlled from the TMC operations center, speed-
reporting loop detectors buried in those roadways, cell-phone and tele-
phone “hot lines” on which motorists can report adverse traffic condi-
tions—usually the source of detecting and locating a majority of
incidents, and radio and telephone communications with roving assis-
tance vehicles and with the other relevant public and private agencies just
described—especially the state or local police patrolling those roads. In
some cases, TMCs receive information from airplanes or helicopters used
by local radio stations to broadcast traffic reports to motorists. Many
TMCs, including Maryland’s CHART, have Internet websites on which
citizens can monitor real-time motion pictures of traffic flows being trans-
mitted from remote television cameras to the TMC itself. The receipt of
accurate data from these sources in a highly timely manner is what makes
it possible for TMCs to orchestrate much faster removal of obstacles to
traffic flows than would occur without TMC efforts. A major qualitative
difference between TMCs in different parts of the nation consists of the
amount of resources that their parent governments (usually state highway
departments) are willing to spend on these functions.
An exhaustive 1999 examination of all aspects of TMCs concluded
that “the most difficult recurring challenges TMCs noted were related to
operations and maintenance staffing.”7
The third crucial activity of TMCs is dispatching appropriate
response teams to the scenes of major accidents or other incidents that
are blocking traffic flows. This requires deciding which agencies need to
be notified and in what order, communicating with them, and following
up—visually, if possible—to ensure that they arrive on the scene and
perform their functions appropriately and quickly. Normally, the TMC
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itself directly controls only a small part of the vehicles needed to

respond to a major accident—usually only the roaming repair and
removal vehicles it operates. All the other required vehicles are con-
trolled by other agencies with many other responsibilities besides
responding to such incidents. At many accident scenes, the rescue and
repair vehicles block traffic lanes more fully and for longer periods than
the vehicles involved in the accident itself—sometimes for much longer
than is absolutely necessary. Although this may be unavoidable under
some circumstances, one of the functions of a TMC is to minimize this
outcome.
A fourth activity of a major TMC concerns diverting traffic to other
routes when a road-blocking incident is likely to delay traffic for a very
long time. This requires deciding whether the incident is likely to cause
unacceptable delays, having preplanned detour routes ready to use in
such cases—including appropriate signage to guide diverted motorists—
and coordinating the execution of the diversion plans. Past experience
can be the basis for deciding what diversion routes should be planned in
advance and what signs and other indicators are needed to make them
effective.
The fifth essential activity is collecting information about the fre-
quency and nature of the incidents the TMC encounters and responds
to, and evaluating the effectiveness of the response efforts of all the
agencies concerned, including the TMC itself. This activity is the major
TMC responsibility most often neglected by TMCs for three reasons.
First, carrying it out diverts the limited resources available to the TMC
from directly responding to ongoing traffic problems. In almost all
human activities, “putting out today’s fires” normally takes resource
allocation precedence over “measuring how well yesterday’s fires were
dealt with.” Second, there is a natural human aversion to avoid evaluat-
ing just how effective one’s own efforts are, compared with their costs or
some other standard. Third, such evaluations are not easy, and they
require technical capabilities different from those of operating ongoing
traffic management activities successfully. Hence many TMCs are not
technically qualified to conduct reliable evaluations. That is why such
evaluations are often delegated to nearby universities or consulting
firms.
The final activity of TMCs is still being developed: integrated man-
agement of all aspects of traffic management in an entire metropolitan
region into a single advanced traffic management system (ATMS). In
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most U.S. regions, this is more of a desired futuristic concept than an

operating reality. In theory, it involves integrated and computerized
coordination of all local traffic signal systems in the region, all freeway
ramp metering systems, all TMCs and their complex sensor and com-
munications systems, all programmable electronic roadway signs and
radio broadcasts of current conditions to motorists, the scheduling of all
road repairs that might impede traffic, and any other devices or pro-
grams that could be used to influence and coordinate traffic flows.
Clearly, this goal requires a degree of complexity and major funding in
organization, design, institutional cooperation, operation, and mainte-
nance that has not been achieved in many, if any, regions. However, it is
the avowed goal of many traffic management professionals.

Are Traffic Management Centers Worth Their Costs?

Most evaluations of the costs and benefits produced by TMCs have con-
cluded that their benefits greatly outweigh their costs. The studies iden-
tified several major benefits.
—Faster response times of repair and rescue vehicles to the scenes of
traffic-blocking incidents. Responses were faster than the ones that
occurred before TMCs existed. This result reduces the total amount of
time that many vehicles must spend “stuck in traffic,” thereby also
reducing fuel consumption and air pollution. For example, a 1995 eval-
uation of the Freeway Service Patrol (FSP)—teams of tow trucks that
provided assistance to motorists in Hayward, California—showed that
FSP increased the number of assisted incidents and reduced the average
response time for vehicle breakdowns assisted by FSP by 57 percent; for
all incidents, the response time declined by 35 percent. However, acci-
dent and breakdown clearance times remained about the same, as did
the duration of incidents.8 The main reason response times were faster
was that assistance vehicles were already cruising the roads concerned.
—Lower accident rates. Accident rates were lower on the roads
served by TMCs than occurred before the TMCs existed, or that occur
on similar roads not served by TMCs. Presumably, lower accident rates
result from faster removal of lane-blocking obstacles than formerly,
since such blockages often lead to “secondary crashes.”
—Faster freeway traffic flow speeds during peak hours and expanded
freeway capacity. Traffic flow is more speedy because lanes are blocked
by incidents for shorter periods than before TMCs existed.
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Evaluations of TMCs have been conducted in many states and cities,
including Maryland, Minnesota, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta,
Detroit, Long Island, Boston, northern California, Orlando, Chicago,
Seattle, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Milwaukee. In all cases that I was
able to track down, the evaluators concluded that the TMCs were pro-
ducing total benefits well in excess of their costs. For example, the Los
Angeles automated traffic surveillance and control system (ATSAC) is
used to manage surface street traffic. A 1993 evaluation of its results
showed that travel time on controlled streets was reduced by 18 percent,
stops were reduced by 41 percent, and air emissions were cut by 35 per-
cent. The study estimated that the overall benefit-cost ratio of this sys-
tem was 23:1.9 That type of success is why so many other communities
have proceeded to create TMCs of their own.
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