Incorporating Incident Data into a Freeway Data Archive for Improved Performance Measurement

The Portland Oregon Transportation Archive Listing (PORTAL) archives high resolution traffic data including speed, volume, and occupancy collected from 500 freeway loop detectors in the Portland metropolitan area. PORTAL currently provides measures related to total congestion that occurs on the freeway network, but cannot presently distinguish between recurrent and non-recurrent congestion effects. In response to the need to make such a distinction, the objective of this paper is to describe the incorporation of freeway incident data received from the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) into PORTAL. ODOT’s freeway incident database includes information about vehicle crashes and stalls, debris on the road, construction and other random events. The paper describes the incident archive architecture and demonstrates how users can view incident data associated with a particular time frame and location. For example, a user analyzing data from a particular day will be able to immediately access associated incident data so the user can determine if the traffic pattern is related to an incident. In addition, freeway incident performance metrics will be described, including tracking of incident trends over time and location and numbers of incidents by incident type. Finally, the paper will describe how comparing incidents with weather data archived in the PORTAL database can be used to determine how weather has influenced incidents. The above-described incident performance metrics are useful to traffic researchers and practitioners and may contribute to incident-reduction measures in the Portland area.

• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Potter, Jessica
  • Tasnim, Suman
  • Tufte, Kristin A
  • Bertini, Robert Lawrence
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 86th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2007-1-21 to 2007-1-25
• Date: 2007

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: CD-ROM
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 12p
• Monograph Title: TRB 86th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers CD-ROM

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Databases; Incident detection; Incident management; Loop detectors; Operations; Performance measurement; Traffic data; Traffic incidents; Traffic speed; Traffic volume
• Identifier Terms: Portland Oregon Regional Transportation Archive Listings (PORTAL)
• Geographic Terms: Portland (Oregon)
• Subject Areas: Administration and Management; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01049576
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 07-0414
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Feb 8 2007 4:59PM