California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This report describes the evaluation of the effectiveness and adequacy of cellular phones for incident detection as an alternative to infrastructure-based surveillance systems. The analysis was part of the I-880 field experiment using the California Highway Patrol's (CHP) Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) incident database. Cellular phones have the highest detection rate among the examined detection sources. Results from the study, however, indicate that incidents reported by cellular phones show greater incident durations than similar incidents reported by the CHP or the Freeway Service Patrol (FSP). This additional delay is attributed to the incident verification process. Index Terms: cellular radio // incident management