Emergency incident management, benefits and operational issues performance and benefits evaluation of CHART

The need to implement an effective incident management systems (IMS) has received increasing attention by general public, media and policy makers, that in turn has required transportation agencies to perform a rigorous evaluation over any implemented plan. Since 1996, the Maryland State Highway Administration (MSHA) has conducted a comprehensive evaluation of its incident response and management program, named CHART. The evaluation study consisted of two phases. Whereas the focus of Phase 1 was on the reliable assess of system performance including incident detection, response, clearance and duration, the core of Phase 2 was to develop the methodology and to estimate resulting system benefits from data available in the CHART incident operations record.