Assessment of the Impact of Incidents near Bottlenecks: Strategies to Reduce Delay

How the location and duration of an incident affect delays near a recurrent bottleneck is evaluated in this study. With conventional kinematic wave theory and some dimensional analysis, tools are provided to determine whether an incident will cause generalized delays (i.e., delays that have a lingering effect for the whole length of the peak hour) according to the incident's magnitude, location, and duration. The results apply to a broad range of cases, encompassing many types of facilities and incidents. Furthermore, the results can be used as a foundation for developing and implementing new strategies to obtain significant reductions in delay. The value of fault-free surveillance is also analyzed and presented as part of an optimization problem for locating roadside assistance vehicles. It is found that this value is very high, which could justify installing advanced traffic-monitoring schemes near major bottlenecks.