Response Time of Highway Traffic Accidents in Abu Dhabi

Abstract

Traffic incidents generate many adverse impacts, especially as far as traffic congestion, air pollution, fuel consumption, and secondary crashes are concerned. Therefore traffic incident responders and operators must know how to improve the efficiency of traffic incident management. This paper presents the results of an investigation into the effects of traffic accident characteristics on accident response time, with fully parametric hazard-based duration models with emphasis on the accelerated failure time metric. Accident characteristics and response times were obtained from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. For an investigation into the factors affecting response time, data were retrieved from the Federal Traffic Statistics System and the Abu Dhabi Highway Collision Investigation Branch (AHCIB) for the period January to December 2009. For the purpose of this study, “response time” was defined as the length of time between the first report of the incident being received by AHCIB and the time that the first collision investigator arrived at the scene. After a goodness-of-fit test was conducted, a Weibull distribution with frailty was used. Results showed that various accident characteristics, including day of the week, month of the year, accident type, and location of the accident, affected response time. These results highlighted some weaknesses in the current highway accident management practices in Abu Dhabi, particularly the impact of lack of resources on the ability of the AHCIB to respond to an accident immediately upon notification of its occurrence. This paper suggests some measures designed to mitigate response problems.

Overview of traffic incident duration analysis and prediction

“…Few studies include incident detection and recovery time [23], as well as define the duration time as the time difference from the time the Freeway Courtesy Patrol (FCP) vehicle arrives on the scene to the time the FCP leaves the scene after clearing the incident [24]. Other studies focus on the clearance time [11,[24][25][26][27], response time [28,29], or different time phases [9,30]. One study divides the response time into two parts: preparation time of the response team and travel time of the response vehicles [29].…”

“…Several studies reveal that the traffic duration time meets the log-normal distribution [12,13,21] or log-logistic distribution [9,31,36,39,41,42]. Weibull distribution (or with gamma heterogeneity or random parameters) provides the best likelihood ratio statistics for the used dataset in some other studies [9,23,25,28,37]. Several other studies report that the generalized F distribution is the best type for the traffic duration time distribution [24,26].…”

Emergency Medical Service Response Time for Road Traffic Accidents in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Analysis of National Data (2016–2020)

“…Sanchez et al [11] observed that a 10 min reduction in the response time can reduce the likelihood of death by one-third. Assessment of response time has been found effective in identifying the gaps and scopes for improvement in the accident management systems in Abu Dhabi [12]. However, such evidence is lacking in the KSA.…”

Effects of Visual Active Deceleration Devices on Controlling Vehicle Speeds in a Long Downhill Tunnel of an Expressway

“…Cornelia [10] also indicated that the rate of dying in a traffic accident in a tunnel is almost twice that elsewhere, and regardless of whether the traffic flow is two-way or one-way, the probability of a traffic accident at the tunnel entrance is higher than that elsewhere in the tunnel. As a bottleneck in an expressway, when an accident happens in a tunnel, it can easily lead to secondary accidents [11]. Therefore, it is very important to make tunnel traffic safer.…”