Incident response - Incidents & clearance times
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Incident response measures showing total incidents and clearance times
Incident response numbers and clearance times
WSDOT Incident Response personnel collect data for all incidents to which an IR team responds in the Washington Incident Tracking System. This data includes times of first awareness, arrival on scene, roadway clearance, and incident clearance which allows WSDOT to analyze various aspects of incident duration. IR teams also record other data such as how they were notified of the incident, incident cause and how many lanes of travel were blocked.
Incidents are the total number of events that WSDOT Incident Response teams responded to, including incidents that were unable to be located.
Incident clearance times are the average time between the first recordable awareness of the incident (detection, notification, or verification) and the time the last responder has left the scene.
For details on the methodology used to calculate, refer to WSDOT's Handbook for Corridor Capacity Evaluation (PDF 5.9MB).
To better show the effects of COVID-19 on the Incident Response program, quarterly data has been added to the dataset.
Source: Washington Incident Tracking System.
Note: The data above only accounts for incidents to which an IR unit responded.
Performance highlights
In 2023, IR teams responded to 42,558 incidents, which is 0.6% less than 42,814 incidents in 2022. The average incident clearance time in 2023 increased 5.6% to 17.1 minutes from 16.2 minutes in 2022.