| In urban areas, congestion on freeways caused by incidents is becoming a daily event, causing great delays and therefore, money spent in time lost and additional fuel spent, as well as excessive contamination. The possibility for construction of more freeways to alleviate this problem is greatly reduced by the unavailability of land and money necessary for construction. As a result, many states and cities are implementing incident management programs to help reduce the time to deal with incidents, and thus reduce the amount of delay.; A key element in the success of the incident management program is the planning of traffic management strategies to reduce the delay until full capacity is achieved once again. Much time can be saved by preplanning diversion routes for freeway incident situations and computer simulation could be an aid in measuring the effectiveness of these different diversion routes. CORSIM, the microscopic simulation program of the Federal Highway Administration, is used to simulate traffic on a test network subjected to the effects of a freeway incident. Two different diversion routes are simulated, and their effectiveness to reduce delay is measured in terms of total and additional delay. The effect of signal optimization along the diversion routes is also evaluated in this study. |
