Measuring the Impact of Recovery Resource Delay on Traffic Incident Management Clearance Times

Traffic incident management (TIM) practices have been widely demonstrated to reduce congestion and secondary crashes. TIM performance measures have evolved over the years and have been a critical tool for agencies to benchmark their operations and identify opportunity for improvement. This paper discusses how the deployment of incident resources can be tracked to improve the fidelity of those performance measures to help guide their TIM program management. Specifically, the paper focuses on integrating a new TIM reference point that identifies when all necessary recovery resources are on scene (T4,ANRR). The value of this reference point is explained through four detailed case studies, and the ability to tabulate this value at scale is demonstrated for 128 incidents. Subsequently, statistics from 128 incidents are presented. Median recovery resource mobilization time for car crashes, semi crashes, car fires, and semi fires were 32, 42, 45, and 66 min, respectively. However, the upper quartile values for those same types of incidents increased to 55, 66, 69, and 105 min, respectively. Of particular note, the paper demonstrates the importance of careful proactive planning for response resources on incidents involving large vehicles that require significant recovery resources and how those response times extend incident clearance times. Tracking T4,ANRR is a first step toward identifying training and perhaps incentive programs to mitigate delays in obtaining all of the needed recovery resources on scene.