Analyzing Disabled Vehicle Incident Durations and Crash Response to Identify Service Patrol Expansions and Reduce the Need for Law Enforcement Involvement

Abstract

Florida’s Road Rangers (RRs) are the state’s safety service patrol. Over 60% of RR responses are for disabled vehicles. This paper investigates the impact RRs have on disabled vehicle events and identifies roads with potential for expansion of RR patrol hours by analyzing 2019 incident and crash data. Over 213,000 disabled vehicle incidents occurred on roadways with partial RR coverage, with 20% occurring during RR inactive periods. The average incident duration more than doubled during inactive periods from 49 min to 100 min. After analyzing several factors, such as incident duration differences and percentage of inactive events, I-10 in Florida’s panhandle was identified as the roadway which would most benefit from increased patrol hours. Ninety-five disabled vehicle crashes occurred on roadways with partial RR coverage, with 56% occurring during inactive patrol hours; these inactive period crashes resulted in 70% of the injuries and 67% of the fatalities. The Tampa area had many crashes (especially during inactive periods), so roadways in this area would benefit from increased patrol hours. A significant relationship between RR presence and response activity duration was found, with an average response activity duration of 106 min during inactive periods and 71 min during active periods. These results show the importance of increasing the periods of RR coverage and how RRs assist law enforcement by responding to disabled vehicle events and their associated crashes, allowing law enforcement to focus their efforts on more severe crashes or other traffic-impacting events.