A Literature Review on Freeway Traffic Incidents and Their Impact on Traffic Operations

Abstract

Congestion on the freeway is more frequent due to several traffic incidents, namely traffic accidents, debris on the road, vehicle breakdown, and collision with guardrails than any other incidents. These, in turn, affect the operational performance of the freeway by increasing queue length, volume, and density. Consequently, effective freeway management strategies can help to minimize these impacts. The study investigates and summarizes existing studies to identify the reasons for and effects of the traffic incidents. Attention is given to the available solutions of the freeway traffic incidents management. The ultimate goal of this study is to identify the gaps which are not yet addressed to improve the operational effectiveness of the freeway. This study was conducted through a comprehensive literature review of existing refereed publications, established standards, and formal guidelines. Literature was sought through the Transport Research International Documentation (TRID) database, IEEE Transactions database, and google scholar search engine. Research focusing on freeway traffic incidents is a growing concern in transportation operations, as transportation network performance depends on it. Due to the advancement of technology, emerging vehicle technologies like connected vehicles have the potential to address these problems affecting the US transportation system and revolutionize mobility in the future. The study can serve as a reference for the researchers that are involved in freeway traffic operations.

Logical Structure of Actions to Reduce the Impacts of Traffic Incidents

“…One of the justifications used by the UN (2020) when announcing the Second Decade of Action for Road Safety (2021-2030) was precisely the need to comply with the SDGs, which demonstrates a strong link between traffic accidents and sustainability. In addition, traffic congestion, which has as one of its main causes the occurrence of traffic incidents (Islam, 2019), is a growing problem in the urbanization of economies that results in wasted time, health problems due to pollution and contributes to the accumulation of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions (Brent and Beland, 2020). Thus, this section will present the impacts caused by the incidents raised through a literature review and areas related to them, as proposed in the methodology.…”

“…The reason is that it meets the needs of passengers and freight transportation between points of origin and destination, thus allowing the entire society to have access to goods and services available in cities (Santos et al, 2021). However, the intensive use of road infrastructure, in an unbalanced matrix, makes the circulation of traffic susceptible to strong impacts such as the occurrence of road incidents, thus causing serious damage to fluidity and road safety (Islam, 2019;Baltar et al, 2021b).…”

Impact of an automated road debris removal system on traffic flow using VISSIM

“…Several studies [6][7][8][9] addressed road debris as a potentially contributing component relevant to road safety and the operational performance of a freeway by increasing the queue length, volume, and density. In particular, Singh et al 9 showed that road debris accounts for 7.3% of the road traffic accidents in Srinagar, India, during one-year period.…”

The Use of Geolocation to Manage Passenger Mobility between Airports and Cities

“…A consequence of this trend is the existence of traffic jams in the main communication routes of cities [2]. As a result, transit times from one place to another increase [3], the cost of gasoline increases [4], and journeys generally require prior planning and the need to start the journey with additional time to account for possible incidents [5] (accidents, construction, meteorological events, etc.). A particular type of this problem occurs in the airports of large cities [6].…”