The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission Deployed an Incident Alert Notification System to Push Alerts to Motorist Smartphones Via Third Parties.
Pennsylvania, United States
Emergency Vehicle Alerts Boost Driver Awareness
Summary Information
Motorist alert systems aim to inform drivers of the location of first responder activity on roadways and boost driver awareness of traffic incidents. Other than infrastructure components like information signs, motorists may receive alerts through smartphone applications or connected on-board units. Specifically, this study highlighted that the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission equipped 158 maintenance and service patrol vehicles with the ability to broadcast emergency alerts, which aimed to share real-time incident information to a mapping provider to push notifications to subscribers within the vicinity of an incident. Impacts on the crash rate of emergency response vehicles were assessed.
METHODOLOGY
When a traffic incident is detected, the service vehicle activates its vehicle mounted amber emergency warning lights and send a signal to the map and navigation service provider. The map provider then pushes an alert to road users who subscribes to these Traveler Information Services to improve situational awareness.
FINDINGS
- Between 2018 and 2020, crashes involving freeway maintenance vehicles responding to incidents decreased from 30 to 0 in areas of Pennsylvania where agency vehicles broadcasted real-time incident alert messages to traveler information systems and in-vehicle navigation applications.
- The incident management notification system was estimated to have alerted 2.8 million road users who subscribed to the map and navigation service provider to incidents happened on the Pennsylvania Turnpike network over 1.5 years.
- Because responder vehicle location is a key part of the technology, some agencies succussed in using data dashboards for better resource management.
