Office of Operations

Research and Development

TRAFFIC INCIDENT MANAGEMENT BENEFIT-COST ESTIMATION TOOL

Traffic incident management (TIM) strategies are major approaches 

to deal with safety and mobility issues resulting from traffic 

incidents on the roadways. These strategies support quick incident 

response, thereby shortening incident duration and controlling 

traffic delays around the occurrence scene. Since resources and 

funding are often limited for State departments of transportation 

and local transportation agencies, it is essential to investigate 

benefits and costs for potential and existing TIM strategies to 

avoid potentially expensive or ineffective approaches.

Various types of TIM strategies have been implemented 

worldwide. Some of the most cost-effective and commonly used 

TIM strategies include:

• Safety Service Patrols.

• Driver Removal Laws.

• Authority Removal Laws.

• Shared Quick-Clearance Goals.

• Pre-established Towing Service Agreements.

• Dispatch Collocation.

• TIM Task Forces.

• Second Strategic Highway Research Program Training.

WEB-BASED TIM-BC TOOL

The research team at Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center 

(TFHRC) developed a Web-based Traffic Incident Management 

Benefit-Cost (TIM-BC) tool with standardized methodology that 

can be universally employed in benefit-cost ratio estimation for 

different TIM programs. Standardization benefits the evaluations 

by creating consistency and therefore greater confidence in the 

validity of the results. With access to the approach in the form of a 

user-friendly, less data-intensive tool, TIM programs and 

taxpayers alike can benefit from cost-effective evaluations.

The tool features different subtools for the eight different TIM 

strategies described above, and users are able to input their own 

parameters based on their local experiences and engineering 

judgment. The tool also provides default values for these parameters 

to facilitate quick TIM-BC evaluation, particularly for areas where 

targeted TIM strategies have not been implemented and no relevant 

data is available. A screenshot of the main navigation page is 

shown below.

A key user interface of one subtool, SSP-BC (for evaluating Safety 

Service Patrol), is shown below. Other than basic Safety Service 

Patrol (SSP) Program information, such as location, number of 

vehicles, and staff for backend program cost calculation, the user 

has the flexibility to

Figure 1. TIM-BC tool 

navigation page with 

panels linking to all

eight subtools

www.fhwa.dot.gov/research/

For more information, please contact: 

Taylor.Lochrane@dot.gov
Office of Operations

Research and Development

input information on roadway geometry, the SSP Program, traffic, 

weather, and incidents. The tool can also automatically generate an 

evaluation report that is professionally designed for an effective 

presentation of evaluation results.

RESEARCH APPROACH

Existing TIM-BC analysis tools were reviewed in order to 

document their capabilities, user-defined parameters, and gaps 

in analytical results. Information gathered from these reviews was 

then used to develop a comprehensive list of future needs, such as 

TIM strategies that have not yet been addressed by any Web-based 

tools, and TIM analysis areas that show inconsistent results among 

currently utilized tools.

The TIM-BC tool can estimate travel delay, fuel consumption, 

emissions, and secondary incidents. The data and

equations encompassed in the database are derived directly from 

well-designed simulation experiments, which consider various 

incident information (i.e., number of lanes, lane blockage, duration, 

and location) under different traffic conditions. The computations 

employ a hybrid statistical-simulation methodology in which 

parameters from regression analysis are combined with results 

from simulation runs to improve the fit of the regression model.

The tool can be used on any updated Web-standard Web browser, 

and can be downloaded as a zip file from FHWA’s Web site at 

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/software/research/operations/ timbc/.

For additional information on the TIM-BC tool, contact Taylor 

Lochrane at taylor.lochrane@dot.gov for tool-related issues and 

Paul Jodoin at paul.jodoin@dot.gov for TIM-related questions.

Figure 2. A screenshot of the Web-based tool shows the different options available, such as location, traffic information, and physical roadway characteristics.

For more information, please contact: 

Taylor.Lochrane@dot.gov 

FHWA-HRT-16-016