Traffic Incident Management
Various traffic incident management scenes - heavy traffic after accident, traffic planning, police car blocking road, overturned car on bridge, detour, rescue workers.
Office of Operations 21st Century Operations using 21st Century Technologies

FHWA Performance Measures Study

Preparedness > TIM > FHWA Performance Measures Study

FHWA completed a brief study on performance measures for Traffic Incident Management (TIM). The study, performed by Texas Transportation Institute, examined the 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. For example, there is no general agreement on what constitutes as an "incident". 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

Additional Resources

  • Incident Management Performance Measures (HTML, PDF 9.32MB)

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