Impact of Abandoned and Disabled Vehicles on Freeway Incident Durations

In most cases, abandoned and disabled vehicles are left within the roadway right of ways. It is common to find a vehicle left on the shoulder, median, gore area or on the travel lane for certain period of time. Experience from the state of Tennessee has shown that 78% of the freeway traffic related incidents are due to disabled and abandoned vehicles. It is hypothesized that the longer the vehicle is left unattended within the right of way, the higher the probability of new incidents and secondary crashes. This paper utilized 2004 to 2010 freeway incident data in Tennessee to evaluate the impact of the length of incident durations caused by disabled and abandoned vehicles. Analysis evaluated the impact of these incidents with respect to roadway location, queue lengths, weather conditions, towing times, lane closure, and the source of incident notification. Temporal factors, including the spectra of the time of the day, the day of the week, and the seasons of the year were evaluated with respect to the number of incidents and incident durations. It was found that vehicles left on the left and right shoulders generated more incidents compared to other locations followed by gore areas and the ramps. Parametric hazard based log-logistic survival model was applied to determine the factors affecting the abandoned and disabled vehicles incident duration. Number of closed lanes, length of the queue formed, construction zones, trucks and towing involvement were found to be significantly associated with longer incident duration.

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