California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

The Bay Area Incident Response System (BAIRS) is an integrated Web and GIS based incident tracking system that provides tools to improve California’s Department of Transportation (Caltrans) incident management capabilities. Currently, BAIRS aids District 4 Maintenance respond to and track over 33,000 incidents per year throughout the San Francisco Bay area.

The report presents the findings from the evaluation of the BAIRS system based on field data on incidents and traffic conditions. Through the implementation of BAIRS, incident response and clearance times were reduced by about 15%. Incident related delays were reduced by 210,000 vehicles-hours annually. The estimated BAIRS benefit-cost ratio is 5:1 based on the incident delay savings. Other benefits that are not reflected in the benefit-cost ratio include reduced fuel consumption and mobile emissions, and improved safety and access for emergency response vehicles.