Overview
The San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC)’s partners with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the California Highway Patrol (CHP) to lead the Bay Area Incident Management Task Force (IMTF). MTC has been working with the IMTF to build a data-driven Traffic Incident Management Dashboard (TIM) to track incident clearance times and trends, and to provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of actions taken. The dashboard has allowed the IMTF to experiment with establishing more detailed regional incident clearance goals by incident type for the Bay Area to supplement the statewide 90-minute clearance goal.
In this case study you will learn:
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How the collaborative development of the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC)’s Traffic Incident Management Dashboard provides an easy to use, web-based tool for viewing current incident characteristics and trends.
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How MTC selected mySidewalk, Inc. to develop a TIM dashboard using data from the California Highway Patrol (CHP).
- How MTC’s TIM Dashboard allows users to view incident details and trends over time. It also includes the ability to explore incident clearance times by incident type, location, severity, corridor, and more.
Background
The collaborative development of the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC)’s Traffic Incident Management Dashboard provides an easy to use, web-based tool for viewing current incident characteristics and trends. The Dashboard is used by staff in the Caltrans District 4 Transportation Management Center to view major incident details and is regularly reviewed with emergency responders and partner agencies to provide context for discussions at task force meetings. With an understanding of how long different types of incidents take to clear, it is easier to identify and measure the regional impacts of traffic incidents, and to track improvements to traffic incident response.
MTC is the transportation planning, funding and coordinating agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, and partners with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the California Highway Patrol (CHP) to lead the Bay Area Incident Management Task Force (IMTF), which was formed in 2002. The IMTF complements efforts by the Bay Area Freeway Service Patrol and the MTC Service Authority for Freeways and Expressways to reduce congestion, improve public safety, and enhance air quality by quickly identifying, responding to, and clearing freeway incidents.
The IMTF is an active multi-agency partnership that includes MTC, Caltrans, CHP, the Federal Highway Administration, local police and fire departments, emergency medical services, county coroners, tow truck companies, and others focused on the safe and quick clearance of freeway traffic incidents. Through quarterly meetings, post-incident debriefs, partnerships to implement freeway safety improvements and more, IMTF agencies promote communication and cooperation to make Bay Area roadways safer for everyone. The Bay Area IMTF is the only such Task Force in California and is recognized as a model statewide for partnerships between transportation and public safety agencies to clear traffic incidents quickly and safely.
On average, 80 first responders or tow truck operators nationwide are struck and killed each year, with another 20,000 injured while responding to crashes on U.S. roads and bridges. Because the likelihood of a secondary crash increases by 2.8 percent for each minute a primary incident is left uncleared, even modest reductions in incident duration can yield significant safety benefits for responders and motorists alike. Every minute saved during an incident saves an estimated four minutes of traffic delay, limits the risk of secondary crashes, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
MTC has been working with the IMTF to build a data-driven program to ensure that incident management projects are informed and supported by reliable data. One of the key elements of this program was the development of the Traffic Incident Management Dashboard — known as TIM for short — to track incident clearance times and trends, and to provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of actions taken from IMTF discussions.
TSMO Planning, Strategies and Deployment
Before the TIM Dashboard was developed, traffic incident information was publicly available in real-time text format through the California Highway Patrol Computer Aided Dispatch System (CHP CAD). However, this information was not presented in an easily accessible format for viewing, reporting or analyzing. MTC and the IMTF approached this problem in a collaborative and creative way that contributed to a culture of innovation and improvement.
With IMTF support, MTC staff in 2019 proposed this project concept as a challenge for consideration by startup companies in the national Startup in Residence (STIR) program. STIR connects government agencies with startups through a streamlined procurement process to create technology products that address civic challenges. During the 16-week residency, governments and startups work together on challenges that improve services for residents or improve internal processes so that governments can deliver better services to residents. If the residency is successful, participating governments and startups have the option to negotiate a longer-term arrangement.
Through this program, MTC selected mySidewalk, Inc. to develop a TIM dashboard using data from the CHP CAD. The goal was to develop a timely, user-friendly dashboard for viewing reports on detailed traffic incident characteristics and trends. The 16-week residency concluded in May 2019 and was provided at no cost to either MTC or partners.
Following development of a successful prototype that was well received by all partners during the residency, MTC decided to continue the relationship with mySidewalk on a pilot basis to track, analyze, and communicate traffic incident data. Development of the TIM Dashboard was completed and launched to partners and the public as a pilot in summer 2020. In 2021, MTC’s Operations Committee approved an ongoing, three-year contract with mySidewalk, noting the company’s unique product had improved access to regional traffic incident data.
Today, the Bay Area TIM Dashboard uses incident details recorded from the CHP’s public-facing incident feed and from Caltrans’ Performance Management System (PeMS). The dashboard shows a summary of recent incidents as well as longer-term incident trends over the past five years. The dashboard is available for use by Caltrans and others to monitor incident trends along 10 different corridors, which can be customized as needed. The dashboard includes incident clearance times and goals based on incident type, including semi-truck and wrong way incidents. Data can easily be visualized through a toggle option on the website, and the raw data can be downloaded.
Communications Planning and Execution
The TIM Dashboard is the result of close coordination among IMTF partners, including the CHP, Caltrans, MTC, fire departments and others who provided feedback and insights during the development process. Partner agencies met with MTC and mySidewalk to provide valuable input as to what reports and information would be most useful, and quarterly Bay Area IMTF meetings provided an inter-agency forum to collaborate and solicit feedback on dashboard development and progress. The IMTF previewed various versions of the dashboard and added input throughout the process. This allowed MTC and the IMTF to build on partnerships established between agencies and encouraged discussion about traffic incident data needs for the Bay Area and across the state. The project also engaged staff from different sections within MTC, which increased awareness of TIM’s value to various agency initiatives and allowed for consideration of traffic incident data from a broader perspective.
Reflecting this wider coordination and broader perspective the TIM Dashboard already has proved useful for applications beyond the initial IMTF project concept, including corridor and bridge projects. The dashboard is being used to conduct a preliminary review of two safety projects implemented in partnership with local fire departments. These include location signage in a complex freeway interchange as well as a suite of safety improvements with guardrails and high friction surface treatment installed in a high-collision mountain corridor.
Outcome, Benefit and Learnings
MTC’s TIM Dashboard allows users to search data using keywords and to view incident trends over time. It also includes the ability to explore incident clearance times by incident type, location, severity, corridor, and more. This information supplements existing sources of traffic incident information and provides a user-friendly visual snapshot of the impacts of incidents and how incident response can affect incident duration.
The dashboard has allowed the IMTF to experiment with establishing more detailed regional incident clearance goals by incident type for the Bay Area to supplement the statewide 90-minute clearance goal. In addition to regularly reviewing the dashboard information with responders and others at IMTF meetings, MTC and the IMTF are using the dashboard to help evaluate recently installed safety improvements.
Thanks to the valuable input and close collaboration from the Bay Area IMTF, the project has inspired new ways to approach traffic incident data challenges, opened new ways to measure TIM performance, and spurred new discussions about how to incorporate TIM and TSMO into more regional projects and programs.