Incident Management in Large Metropolitan Areas

The Intelligent Transportation Systems World Congress in Detroit featured a technical session on incident management in large metropolitan areas.  Presenters included Xianding Tao from the District of Columbia Department of Transportation (USA), Richard Beaubien from Beaubien Engineering (USA), Scott Carlson from Iteris (USA), Joseph Snyder from AECOM (USA), and Olimpio Mendes de Barros from CET (Brazil).  The moderator was Tien-Pen HSU from National Taiwan University (Chinese-Taipei).  Mr. Beaubien’s presentation focused on the use of partnerships to promote traffic incident management in Metropolitan Detroit.  Many of the responders to traffic incidents are not employed by state government, so partnerships are needed with local police, fire service, emergency medical, broadcast media, and tow services.  Partnerships are needed to assure that the varied responders know who is in charge of what and how to work with each other.