01363066

Component

Law enforcement personnel are critical components of the transportation process. Arguably their most important role, and the one that is the focus of this paper, is their involvement in the management and control of traffic. Police officers are quite effective under these conditions because they can directly read and adapt to dynamic traffic environments. However, the decision of whether police control is effective and when, where, and how it should be used is not backed by any hard data or scientific study. This paper summarizes one component of a research effort to analyze and evaluate the use of police for traffic control during emergencies. In this work, the authors use the plan developed for the evacuation of the eastern shore region of Maryland to quantitatively analyze the correlations that exist between intersection attributes and the decisions that are made to assign police traffic control to them. The findings suggest that intersections on evacuation routes, US highway, State highways, interchanges, and intersections in the proximity of bridges and jurisdictional boundaries were more likely to be assigned police traffic control personnel. These results provide an understanding of factors that influence the selection of intersections for police control and identifiable relationship between the constraints and issues considered to be important by police and other tasked with the planning of emergency traffic management.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AN000 Safety and System Users

01362476

12-4136

English

0000-0002-1703-2995

13p

2012

Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Disasters and emergency operations; Evacuation; Evaluation; Police traffic direction

Eastern Shore (Maryland and Virginia)

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Security and Emergencies; I73: Traffic Control

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2012 Paper #12-4136

TRIS, TRB

Feb 8 2012 5:22PM