Traffic safety a concern
CRANBERRY TWP — A drone, heavy-duty tow trucks and other equipment used by PennDOT and the Pennsylvania Turnpike were on display Thursday at the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission's Regional Freight Conference.
About 80 people from around the state and Ohio attended the conference, which included a morning session at the Regional Learning Alliance and an afternoon demonstration session at the Cranberry Township Public Works Operations Center that focused on traffic incident management. The theme was “Emerging trends in freight.”
The Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, or SPC, is a regional planning agency that covers Butler, Lawrence, Beaver, Armstrong, Indiana, Allegheny, Westmoreland, Washington, Fayette and Greene counties.
Traffic incident management, or clearing incidents safely and quickly, is key to putting the region in a competitive position for freight development, said Domenic D'Andrea, manager of transportation operations and safety for SPC.
D'Andrea said incidents are the cause of 25 percent of all congestion on roads. For every minute a lane is blocked, it takes four minutes to clear the traffic blocked up behind it, he said.
Todd Leiss, traffic incident management coordinator for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, said a three-hour closure on the Turnpike that diverts traffic costs the commission about $49,000 in lost tolls — so time is money when it comes to managing incidents.
It's also about safety for commuters and first responders, Leiss said, because the longer incidents are on the road the more likely it is another one will occur.
To help move things along, State Farm Safety Patrol Vehicles on Wednesday are going to begin giving 2.5 gallons of gas to people whose vehicles have run out, Leiss said. Before, the patrol vehicles would call a towing company for the motorists to get gas.
The Turnpike has also started offering monetary incentives to towing companies that can clear an accident in 90 minutes or less. The incentivized towing program is only in the Philadelphia area, but, Leiss said, it's been going well and it could be expand.
The Turnpike also launched a drone program in 2015 — two licensed pilots use a drone for traffic infrastructure planning and design.
Turnpike officials also are looking into how drones could be used to gain situational awareness for large-scale incidents, said Mike Pack, Turnpike traffic operations project manager.
“If you think of it, you can probably adapt a drone to help you out with it,” Pack said.
Thanks to its proximity to several major interstates and highways, the township's high-tech traffic operations center and its successful SPC traffic incident management team, Cranberry was selected as a host site for the conference.
“Cranberry is a success story for us,” said Doug Smith, SPC transportation planning director.
Cranberry has one of five traffic incident management teams in the SPC region. The team consists of all first responders such as police, fire department, EMS, towing companies, PennDOT, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission and municipalities.
The traffic incident management teams meet a few times a year to talk and get training, and they meet after large incidents to assess what went well and what can be improved upon, Smith said.
“We can't continue to build more and more highways, so we need to make sure we have operational efficiency,” Smith said.
