Evaluation of arterial incident management impacts using traffic simulation

This paper presents a traffic simulation approach to evaluate the impacts of incident management programs and the provision of real-time travel information in response to incidents. A traffic simulation model of a commuting corridor was used to simulate a large number of incident scenarios and measure their impacts. An incident management strategy that can reduce the duration of an incident blocking all lanes from 30 to 15 min was found to have the potential to provide 17% reduction in travel times. The environmental benefits were also substantial, showing a 22% reduction in fuel consumption rate and 20% reduction in CO. The provision of real-time travel information was also tested by advising drivers to use an alternative route. The results showed that provision of travel information in the presence of an incident has the potential to reduce travel times by 5%. These impacts were found to be dependent on network features and capacities of diversion routes. It was also found that the proportion of drivers complying with route diversion advice has an influence on the benefits to be obtained from these systems. The best network performance was obtained for driver compliance rates between 50 and 60%