Reducing Incident-Induced Emissions and Energy Use in Transportation: Use of Social Media Feeds as an Incident Management Support Tool

By 2020, traffic delay is froecasted to cost 8.4 million hours for society and result in a fuel waste of 4.5 billion gallons in the United States (U.S.). Besides the wasted time and fuel, incidents also cause local pollution (due to higher levels of emissions), and injuries/fatalities. Roadway accidents are responsible for the majority of this high toll a 57.9%. If an incident is not cleared in a timely fashion, the queue back-up due to incidents can further block nearby ramps or intersections, causing additional delays. Early incident detection is also reported to save lives by increasing the survival probability of an injury accident victim. In order to reduce these negative impacts, government agencies invest in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) infrastructure (such as traffic sensors and cameras) for better management of traffic, including roadway incidents. ITS infrastructure includes and array of information collection systems to share real-time data with integrated traffic control systems and advisory alerts designed to manage traffic, detect incidents, and provide travelers with current route information. A wide range of statistical inference methods and algorithms as well as commercialized products are suggested for efficient and accurate detection. However these technologies heavily depend on input from ITS infrastructure, i.e. magnetic loop detectors, Bluetooth readers, traffic cameras, etc. Consequently, such sensor dependent incident management (IM) strategies come with substantial infrastructure and maintenance costs. Incident detection methods with lower costs can yield a very high cost-benefit ratio. Use of social media feeds to detect traffic indidents is one such approach which does not require any infrastructure investment, yet has shown to exhibit a strong potential for effectiveness.

• Record URL:
  http://www.utrc2.org/research/projects/reducing-incident-induced-emissions-and-energy-use-transportation-use-social-media

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Funding: $74119
• Contract Numbers:

  49198-37-26

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  University Transportation Research Center

  City College of New York
  Marshak Hall, Suite 910, 160 Convent Avenue
  New York, NY  United States  10031
• Project Managers:

  Eickemeyer, Penny

• Performing Organizations:

  Stony Brook University

  100 Nicolls Road
  Stony Brook, NY  United States  11794
• Principal Investigators:

  Yazici, Anil

  Kamga, Camille

• Start Date: 20150805
• Expected Completion Date: 20170630
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Exhaust gases; Fatalities; Incident detection; Incident management; Intelligent transportation systems; Pollutants; Real time information; Social media; Traffic delays
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Energy; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01622868
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: University Transportation Research Center
• Contract Numbers: 49198-37-26
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Jan 24 2017 11:30AM