Using Connected Vehicle Data to Evaluate Impact of Secondary Crashes on Indiana Interstates

Interstate crashes often result in significant queuing, which can lead to secondary crashes in or at the back of the queue. These secondary crashes are of national concern and their occurrence and duration of traffic impact can now be assessed with connected vehicle data. This study evaluated 195 unique incidents in 2019 that involved one or more secondary crashes. Approximately 84
^%
of the secondary crashes led to property damage only (PDO) whereas 15% and 1% of the secondary crashes led to personal injuries (PI) and fatalities (F) respectively. This study uses commercially available connected vehicle data to assess the impact of these secondary crashes on Interstate mobility using metrics such as event duration time and road closure time. The connected vehicle data for events longer than 2 hours showed that 29% of evaluated incidents had a total road closure and 30% of incidents over 2 hours had event duration longer than 5 hours. This study summarizes the mobility impacts of secondary crashes on Indiana Interstates and provides foundational data for agencies to invest in public safety training to accelerate incident clearance to reduce secondary crashes.