Traffic Incident Management Program
photos of traffic blocked by cones (Photo by Dave Gatley/FEMA News Photo), fire emergency workers, police officers, tow truck removing car from accident scene, and ambulance
Office of Operations - 21st Century Operations Using 21st Century Technologies
Home > Performance Measures

FHWA Performance Measures Study

FHWA has recently completed a brief study of performance measures for Traffic Incident Management (TIM). The study, performed by Texas Transportation Institute examined TIM performance measurement practices of transportation and public safety agencies (primarily law enforcement and fire/rescue) across the United States. The goal of the study was to provide a better understanding of how transportation and public safety agencies measure performance in traffic incident management and to identify the differences in the definitions and data sources of the measures of used.

The study found that while many agencies measure performance related to traffic incident management, the definition of the measures are inconsistent across transportation and public safety disciplines. Agencies tend to measure what is important to them with little coordination on measurement with other agencies in the same region.

The most common measures for traffic incident management are:

  • Number (or frequency) of incidents
  • Detection time
  • Response time
  • Clearance time

There is no common definition of these measures, however, or any general agreement on what constitutes an "incident".

Incident Management Performance Measures (HTML, PDF 9.5MB).

Download the free adobe acrobat reader to view PDFs You will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the PDF on this page.

Office of Operations