Road Weather Management Program
photos of lightning, trucks plowing snow, an empty road before a storm, and an evacuation
Office of Operations 21st century operations using 21st century technologies

Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Title:

Assessing Weather, Environment, and Loop Data for Real-Time Freeway Incident Prediction

Abstract:

This paper evaluated weather, environment, and loop data conditions that are promising indicators for real-time freeway incident prediction. First, the ability to predict the likelihood of selected incident types using weather and environment data was examined. Then, loop detector data were analyzed for conditions useful for in-lane incident prediction. Non-nested and nested multinomial logit models were estimated using the data from the selected freeways in Austin, Texas. The estimation results revealed that factors such as visibility, time of day, and lighting condition are significant determinants of incident type while five-minute average occupancy and coefficient of variation in speed are strong predictors of in-lane freeway accidents.

Source(s):

85th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting, Texas Transportation Institute. For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2006

Author:

Songchitruksa, Balke

Keywords:


Adverse weather
Visibility
Traffic management

PDF files can be viewed with the Acrobat® Reader®.

Office of Operations