Operational impacts of incident quick clearance legislation: a simulation analysis Ryan Fries 1 * , Carol Hamlin 2 , Mashrur Chowdhury 3 , Yongchang Ma 4 and Kaan Ozbay 5 1 Department of Civil Engineering, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Box 1800, Edwardsville, IL 62026, U.S.A. 2 Woolpert, Suite 101, 415 Port Centre Parkway, Portsmouth VA, 23704, U.S.A. 3 Department of Civil Engineering, Clemson University, 131 Lowry Hall, Clemson, SC 29634, U.S.A. 4 IEM, Inc. 3131 RDU Center, Suite 120, Morrisville, NC 27560, U.S.A. 5 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rutgers University, 632 Bowser Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854-8014, U.S.A. SUMMARY Many states in the US have enacted quick clearance laws requiring drivers of vehicles involved in minor incidents to move their vehicles from travel lanes prior to the arrival of first responders. Since little is known about the effectiveness of these laws, this research sought to find the benefit–cost ratio of advertising quick clearance legislation to improve driver compliance, and compare it with benefit–cost ratios of other incident management strategies, particularly traffic cameras, freeway service patrols, and traffic sensors. The analysis used traffic simulation that applied application programming interfaces to produce random spatial and temporal occurrence of incidents, including incident start times, durations, and locations, based on normal distributions developed from field data, to test before and after the law scenarios. The results provide decision makers with support for prioritizing funding between these incident management strategies and indicated that investments in the advertisement of this law was beneficial. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1. INTRODUCTION Automobile incidents, resulting in property damage only, made up 69.3% of the 6.2 million crashes on America’s roadways in 2004 [1]. Because these minor crashes, in combination with disabled vehicles blocking one or more lanes, cause excessive delay due to the nature of the volume–capacity relationship, transportation authorities have begun studying methods to clear these incidents as quickly as possible to reduce interruptions to traffic flow. This type of delay, also known as nonrecurring congestion, comes with a much higher price to both motorists and the community than recurring traffic delays because it is unexpected. Incident delay can bring about many negative outcomes in terms of lost productivity, increased fuel consumption and emissions, diminished quality of life, and numerous other consequences [2]. Safety concerns, such as secondary crashes associated with the delay caused by the primary incident, and struck-by-incidents, in which emergency responders are hit by other drivers, also represent a significant risk on high-speed freeway facilities. The impacts of incident duration on traffic delay have been long studied by many others for various applications. Frith et al. [3] studied roadway capacity during and following an incident, while Carson et al. [4] investigated the effectiveness of incident management systems in Washington State by JOURNAL OF ADVANCED TRANSPORTATION J. Adv. Transp. 2012; 46:1–11 Published online 24 September 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/atr.135 *Correspondence to: Ryan Fries, Department of Civil Engineering, Clemson University, 131 Lowry Hall, Clemson, SC 29634, U.S.A. E-mail: rfries@clemson.edu Abbreviations: GIS, Geographical Information Systems; IDAS, Intelligent Transportation Systems Deployment Analysis System; NCHRP, National Cooperative Highway Research Program; S2P, Shape to PARAMICS; SCDOT, South Carolina Department of Transportation; SCDNR, South Carolina Department of Natural Resources; TMC, Traffic Management Center; USDOT, United States Department of Transportation. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.