Freeway management and the impact on response and clearance times

Abstract

Paper presented at the 33rd Annual Southern African Transport Conference 7-10 July 2014 "Leading Transport into the Future", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

The first Freeway Management System (FMS) was launched as a pilot along the Ben Schoeman Freeway in Gauteng during 2007/2008. Since, then complete systems were rolled out in the larger Gauteng Area, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. These systems are currently being expanded in all three these areas to cover nearly 500 kilometres of freeways and which are controlled from three state-of-theart control centres in Midrand, Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg. In general, FMS offers various benefits, amongst others real-time information to the public for real-time route choices but it also offers faster detection times of incidents that should result in faster responses to the scene and better management of the scene. This paper explores the benefits of the FMS’s specifically in terms of what has happened to incident response and clearance times over the past 3,5 years. The focus is specifically on the performance of the Western Cape FMS. The system has been in place since May 2010, i.e. for nearly four years. Data was collected throughout this period and these are used to investigate operational trends. From the available data, it is evident that response times have reduced with at least 67% over the past three years. This applies to all responding services in the Western Cape. Clearance times of incidents involving fatalities have also reduced significantly from more than four hours to around 2, 5 hours. However, lately there has been an increasing trend which needs to be management carefully.