In cooperation with the Montgomery County Office of Emergency Management (MCOEM), MVRPC has engaged our regional partners in a discussion regarding traffic incident management on Dayton area interstates and interstate look-alikes (i.e. US 35 & SR 4). Traffic incident management (TIM) is a multi-jurisdictional operations strategy that promotes a coordinated and planned approach to improve safety and minimize traffic delay due to an incident on the regional highway network.
Many local emergency response agencies have stated that responding to highway incidents pose the greatest danger to responders, victims, and motorists. A coordinated TIM program among local emergency response agencies can significantly reduce these dangers while providing numerous benefits, including:
- Improving on-site communication between professional responders.
- Outlining the priorities and capabilities of each emergency response entity.
- Promoting rapid, well-organized and coordinated clearance of incidents.
- Increasing safety for responders, victims, and the motoring public.
- Reducing the frequency of secondary accidents within the resulting traffic queue.
- Maintaining the flow of commerce and just-in-time deliveries.
- Moderating non-recurrent congestion.
- Enhancing air quality.
This effort has been organized as the Traffic Incident Management Subcommittee of the Montgomery County OEM Technical Advisory Committee. Meeting quarterly, this group is working to draft and implement a regional traffic incident management program in the Miami Valley. The development process for this program can be found here.