Overview
Sam Schwartz Engineering and TransSafe (the “consulting team”) were engaged by the City of Seattle in May 2015 to review national best practices in Traffic Incident Management (TIM), evaluate the state of TIM in the City, and make recommendations for improvements to Seattle’s TIM procedures. The project’s genesis was an incident during which slow clearance of an overturned tractor trailer rendered the Alaskan Way Viaduct (SR-99) closed to traffic for nine hours in March 2015. A lack of coordination among agencies in Seattle – including but not limited to the Seattle Police Department(“SPD”) and the Seattle Department of Transportation (“SDOT”) – was immediately identified as a recurring problem in Seattle’s TIM response. A major focus of this project, as a result, was examining how multi-agency responses to major traffic incidents could be improved in Seattle through stronger preparation, training, and agency cooperation.