Overview
In 2019 The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) established a new program for the Phoenix Metropolitan area, Maricopa County to help reduce congestion while improving traffic safety to the motoring public using effective Traffic Incident Management (TIM) practices and methods. The program called the Incident Response Unit (IRU) assists in meeting the overall mission of ADOT. These objectives/operations provide a multi-jurisdictional and coordinated strategy to detect, respond to, and clear traffic incidents so that traffic flow can be restored quickly and safely. The IRU program since its inception on October 01, 2019, was designed to work in unison with other units within the ADOT organization, law enforcement, and private sector companies in quickly responding to incidents. Prior to the inception of the IRU programming ADOT would have on call personnel to respond from Maintenance crews. The employees operated out of ADOT’s Central Maintenance District volunteering to be available for emergency calls. Since the inception of the IRU program the following have been noted:
• Reduction of response times to incidents in the metropolitan area.
• Reduction in costs in expenditures for other work units such as maintenance staff since incident response has been removed from their responsibilities.Reduction of response time to incidents has led to less traffic delay, congestion and air quality issues, The IRU program saved overtime hours for maintenance crew staff, which resulted in cost savings that could be returned to highway maintenance programs.
In this case study you will learn:
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How Arizona DOT recognized that Maricopa County maintenance crews were not able to efficiently respond to traffic incidents in a timely fashion while still performing needed highway maintenance tasks.
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How a new Incident Response Unit (IRU) program was developed in Maricopa County to dedicate staff specifically to incident response tasks.
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How the IRU program resulted in reduction of response time to incidents, which led to less traffic delay, congestion and air quality issues, as well as how the IRU program resulted in cost savings that could be returned to highway maintenance programs.
Background
In 2019 The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) established a new program for the Phoenix Metropolitan area, Maricopa County to help reduce congestion while improving traffic safety to the motoring public using effective Traffic Incident Management (TIM) practices and methods. The program called the Incident Response Unit (IRU) assists in meeting the overall mission of ADOT. These objectives/operations provide a multi-jurisdictional and coordinated strategy to detect, respond to, and clear traffic incidents so that traffic flow can be restored quickly and safely.
Currently, Maricopa County is the fastest growing county in the United States. Maricopa County, Arizona's estimated population is 4,651,440 with a growth rate of 1.82% in the past year according to the most recent United States census data. With that being said, the growing highway congestion continues to rise at a faster rate than transportation investments. The costs of congestion can be an obstacle to economic activity, hamper quality of life through diminished air quality, lost personal time, and other negative factors.
The IRU program since its inception on October 01, 2019, was designed to work in unison with other units within the ADOT organization, law enforcement, and private sector companies in quickly responding to incidents. Prior to the inception of the IRU programming ADOT would have on call personnel to respond from Maintenance crews. The employees operated out of ADOT’s Central Maintenance District volunteering to be available for emergency calls.
This call out process was in essence a loss of time. Time is an imperative performance measurement when reducing secondary collisions, causing further property damage, injury, or loss of life. Furthermore, when the loss of time is a factor, the incident has a higher probability of potential injury, loss of life, or loss of property to the motoring public, and first responders. In its infancy stage the IRU program was developed not only to implement the process as stated above, but to free up time for other work units from ADOT that would normally respond to concentrate on ongoing maintenance projects. The program has overcome challenges and had successes specifically in the area of cost savings. With any program there is always the need to reevaluate the overall efficiencies and effectiveness of the program. The IRU program has developed a self-inspection of continuous improvement in their operational and administrative roles. It is imperative to find areas of improvement and act upon them to improve the quality of the work product for the customers.
TSMO Planning, Strategies and Deployment
In June of 2021, the IRU program noted the current performance matrix evaluation system needed to be upgraded to gather the appropriate data to analyze the costs to the affected work units. The IRU personnel reviewed and identified (13) areas of the performance matrix which were compatible with other work units. i.e., maintenance. The categories chosen for this document allow the reviewer to see the costs in what was required from other work units which are now the responsibilities of the IRU team in meeting the overall objectives/mission of the ADOT.
The data points were reviewed by personnel with all current data available to develop a baseline in expenditures. This required several data points being extracted and put into a format for the reviewer to analyze and develop a final document for a contrast view of the expenditures being spent by the IRU program versus the cost to the other work units. This required individual blocks of data points from each work group being compared for a final review in cost savings to the other work units. There are a total of five other work groups, collectively (35) individual employees, being analyzed in comparison to the IRU program and its 14 team members.
Communications Planning and Execution
The ADOT developed a partnership with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to work in unison to provide a quality service to the citizens of Arizona regarding both their interests in improving air quality and relieving congestion. This partnership assisted in the development of the IRU program to effectively support the goals of the U.S Department of Transportation and the Arizona Department of Transportation by outlining a criterion to provide “deliverable” performance measurements in reducing response times, clearance times, reducing traffic congestion and air quality.
The IRU program also partnered with State Farm Insurance company in early February of 2021. This additional component to the program assisted the Arizona Department of Public Safety (AZDPS) through sponsorships of the IRU response program. The IRU team provides traffic control and assistance to motorists, allowing troopers to focus on investigating collisions and traffic enforcement.
The commitment from all three partnerships has led to the success of the IRU program, furthering the ADOT mission of providing quality transportation services while improving highway safety and saving the citizens tax dollars.
Outcome, Benefit and Learnings
Since the inception of the IRU program the following have been noted:
• Reduction of response times to incidents in the metropolitan area.
• Reduction in costs in expenditures for other work units since incident response has been removed from their responsibilities.
These reductions in costs are now being reallocated to other services and projects in the areas of maintenance. A lesson learned with this newly developed program is deciding when to deploy the IRU team for the best result in reducing and actively responding to incidents in the field. The initial inception of the program was to respond to all calls for service, to include after hours. This was to develop a baseline of expenditures being spent for the program. This, in turn, caused a cost increase in overtime and materials, i.e., fuel consumption, miles on vehicles and maintenance for vehicles. This was re- evaluated in June of 2021. This review, re-allocation of resources, and a re-configuration of scheduling needs/hours was required with data driven analysis. The data was reviewed, and numerous areas of improvements in deployment of personnel were found. This analysis identify optimal times for personnel to be ready to respond, as well as identified the most common types of incidents and locations. To optimize TIM.
When the information was extracted, it was put into a database for review and analyzed to reduce the impact in overtime expenditures but not at the cost of safety or mitigating TIM principles. When this review was completed and implemented, a reduction of overtime citing a reduction of 59% from the previous fiscal year. This significant reduction in overtime expenditure has led to the development of future deployments of the IRU team to be deployed on high volume traffic days i.e., holiday travels. The team is utilizing the cost savings and deploying its personnel on these high traffic days to detect and clear incidents in reducing congestion and improve air quality for the citizens of Arizona.