By THOMAS RYLL, The Columbian (Clark County, Washington)
At 9:55 a.m. on a late-January morning, Dustin Ross was driving on Interstate 5 south of Portland when he spotted a large cardboard box in the middle of an off-ramp.
Looking for things like cardboard boxes in unlikely places, especially if they could discombobulate traffic, is part of Ross’ work as a Comet truck driver for the Oregon Department of Transportation.
Ross, after dodging vehicles on the off-ramp, dutifully retrieved the carton, which was 3 feet square and a foot thick, and leaned it against the concrete barrier at the edge of the pavement.
Taking a peek inside lost goods isn’t part of the job, so Ross could only wonder, especially after reading text on the outside of the box. “I think it was full of string,” said Ross as he settled back into the equipment-stuffed cab of his big Ford Comet rig.
Another potential disaster, or at least a messy off-ramp, averted.
As traffic on the metropolitan-area freeway system has slowly worsened, transportation officials on both sides of the river have tried to keep pace through a series of measures, among them Oregon’s Comet rigs and Washington’s generically named Incident Response trucks.
Researchers with the Texas Transportation Institute say that more than half of all freeway congestion is the result of “incidents,” the stalls and wrecks and lost cardboard boxes and even the occasional load of spilled chicken gizzards that ruin traffic’s forward progress.
Part of that congestion problem is the fact that wrecks cause wrecks -- the “secondary incidents” that occur when gawkers or otherwise distracted drivers help make a big mess even bigger. Estimates vary, but at least 13 percent of freeway crashes are thought to be the result of earlier wrecks. The ability of highway crashes to cause completely unrelated delays can be phenomenal: Ross has seen 4-mile-long backups triggered solely by traffic slowing to watch accident cleanups in lanes headed the opposite direction.
Comet and Incident Response trucks aren’t tow trucks or fire vehicles, nor do drivers conduct law enforcement activities or investigate wrecks. Their primary work is to deal with small stuff before it becomes big stuff, and because they are often first on the scene, the drivers often become the eyes and ears for fire, police and tow trucks.
Incident response rigs are roving service stations, loaded with one-gallon gas cans, quarts of motor oil and transmission fluid, radiator water, clamps and bolts, jacks, tow ropes, battery cables, flares, duct tape, message signs and fuel transfer pumps to empty leaking diesel tanks. Ross, who volunteered at two fire departments in the Longview area before taking the Comet job, has temporarily fixed flat tires by driving screws into punctured treads. He carries a chain saw to clear the occasional fallen limb in outlying areas. His 2002 Ford isn’t set up to move wrecked vehicles, but more than once he has pulled 100,000-pound tractor-trailers uphill to clear them from freeway shoulders.
Incident response efforts aren’t new; they started here in 1993 and in Portland in 1997. Even more recent, at least on this side of the river, is the advent of several dozen traffic cameras, 10 new ones in Clark County alone. They peer up and down the freeways, looking for trouble.
The cameras are primary tools for traffic managers in transportation department centers in Vancouver and downtown Portland. These highway nerve centers -- the Vancouver operation didn’t even exist three years ago -- help coordinate incident response, fire and police activities with the goal of reducing traffic jams. Meanwhile, the cameras also provide Web site still images to the pubic: You can sign on to the Web site to confirm that the commute home will be lousy.
Freeway message signs display traffic information, and pavement loop detectors provide officials with information on vehicle speeds, all in the name of greasing the skids for highway travelers.
The newly finished draft of a two-year, $84,000 Portland State University study concludes that, unlike many government programs, the Comet operation pays for itself -- perhaps many times over.
But not directly. The benefit is to the motoring public, through the value of time saved by scraping up traffic accidents and stalls quicker than they otherwise would be.
Robert Bertini, a PSU assistant professor and the study’s principle investigator, said it is difficult to estimate the value of time lost when trucking companies and commuters sit in traffic. But if Comet operations reduce the length of a traffic incident on average by just 30 seconds, then that, it is estimated, would cover Comet’s $1.5 million annual operating cost. “Many studies around the country have shown that IR reduces incident time by 10 to 20 minutes,” he said. “We have strong confidence in the conclusions of our study.”
Southwest Washington’s counterpart to Comet (which stands for COrridor ManagEment Team) is the state Department of Transportation’s Incident Response operation. It was not part of the study, but Incident Response has an identical function on a smaller scale.
Its role has increased. In July 2002, as part of a statewide push, Incident Response trucks were put into service here for the first time in “roving” mode during morning and evening rush hours. Rather than waiting to be called out, trucks are assigned to patrol, looking for trouble.
When push comes to shove
Chris Vigna, a driver and Incident Response coordinator, said the roving concept paid dividends on a mid-February morning on I-5 in the Salmon Creek area.
Vigna was on patrol when he received a call through a Washington State Patrol trooper about a disabled vehicle in the southbound lanes, in the area where construction had squeezed I-5’s lanes to 11 feet with no shoulders. While en route, Vigna spotted a second disabled car south of the first. Like the first, it was also blocking one lane of traffic. It was a purely coincidental occurrence, lightning striking twice.
The nose of Vigna’s truck is covered with heavy sheet plastic, turning it into a soft-nosed pusher. With it, Vigna shoved the first car to the 99th Street off-ramp.
That left the second vehicle. Returning to the freeway in the usual way -- driving north, then south -- to reach the car would have meant a lengthening delay for queuing traffic. Instead, with WSP blocking both lanes, Vigna was able to drive the wrong way in the southbound lanes to reach the second car.
Although her car was undamaged, the driver was in tears. With a bit of counseling, Vigna calmed the motorist and repeated the pushing operation.
As bad as the delay might have been for southbound travelers, “In a matter of about five minutes we had both cleared,” said Don Wagner, regional administrator for the state Department of Transportation. Without a roving incident response truck nearby, “that could have been a half an hour.”
To motorists stuck in traffic, no emergency response will ever be fast enough. As cars creep past an accident scene -- which may or may not even be visible when the back of the queue reaches the area -- commuters can only dream of helicopters that swoop in to retrieve bent or busted vehicles.
And while cameras and Comet trucks are part of the strategy for keeping traffic moving, there is a limit to their effectiveness as population continues to grow and highways are increasingly clogged.
An annual report by the Texas Transportation Institute looks at congestion in major population centers. In 1982, the Portland-Vancouver area was ranked 36th worst nationwide; that has slipped almost every year, to eighth -- of 76 urban areas -- in the 2001 report, the most recent.
The report also looks at the percentage of traffic slowdowns caused by accidents and other “incident delays” as opposed to too many vehicles crammed into too little space at rush hour. The incident delay figure has changed little in 20 years of transportation institute studies. The high was 58 percent in 1982; the low of 54 percent held constant for seven years, from 1995 to 2001.
“Are we ever going to get down to zero? No,” said Wagner. “But we’re trying to avoid irritating people who start taking chances, like driving on the shoulder, to get around traffic delays.”
Both he and Dennis Mitchell, who oversees Comet operations in Portland, said they are generally satisfied with the staffing of incident response efforts. Wagner said that in another year or so it may be necessary to add more roving trucks in Clark County. Mitchell said he hopes to use the findings of the Portland State University study “to maintain what we’ve got” in an era of public-agency budget cutting.
PSU researcher Bertini said incident response programs “are unique in the public sector. The drivers are well trained and they really take their jobs seriously. And there is the public relations value. This is one of the few times where where the public and ODOT employees intersect.”
‘Three percent terror’
At 11:20 on the January morning when he retrieved the cardboard box from the off-ramp, Ross was steering his Comet truck through the Terwilliger curves on northbound I-5 when he came across a Chevrolet Corsica sedan. Its right-rear wheel rested on a curb between an off-ramp and the right freeway lane. The car was canted at an angle to the rushing traffic, as if the driver had veered toward the ramp and changed course at the last second.
While a white stuffed animal watched from a perch on the Corsica’s back seat, the elderly driver got out off the car and approached Ross as he jumped out of the truck.
She had missed her freeway exit and was looking for a way to return. Ross offered some advice. Back in the truck, he ticked off the exits she had driven past while wandering down the freeway. Her intended exit was six miles back.
This was a driver who might well have had difficulty piloting a living-room recliner, let alone a car in 60-mph traffic on a notoriously dangerous set of freeway curves. Ross took a deep breath as the motorist accelerated and steered into the right lane. One car swerved to avoid hitting her. “Some people say this job is 97 percent boredom and 3 percent sheer terror,” he said.
It was a quiet morning that day; in two hours that included a brief stop at a maintenance shop, Ross moved the cardboard box, jump-started a Peterbilt with a low battery, offered advice to the lost motorist and supplied the driver of a delivery truck with a clamp for the vehicle’s turbocharger system. Ross even installed the clamp.
PSU’s Bertini has been involved with three studies of incident response operations, two of them in California. In Los Angeles, “They stopped keeping track of customer satisfaction reports because there weren’t any negative responses.”
There was one anecdotal report of a comment that wasn’t positive, Bertini said. It came from a motorist who had a habit of running out of gas so he could get the gallon of fuel carried by incident response drivers. “He got mad when they cut him off,” said Bertini.
At the end of his shift, Dustin Ross stopped by the Oregon Department of Transportation’s traffic management operations center in downtown Portland. The center is a 24/7 operation, relying heavily on the network of highway cameras and 14 wide-screen monitor images to keep track of traffic conditions. Ross stopped at a computer console. One of Oregon’s cameras just happens to be mounted near the off-ramp where he found the dropped box earlier in the morning.
Ross, using controls at the console, panned and zoomed the off-ramp camera. The big box -- with its load of string or who knows what, was gone.
Washington’s Incident Response and Oregon’s Comet (Portland Area)
* Accidents handled monthly: Comet 250; Incident Response 28.
* Number of other calls monthly: Comet 950; IR 230.
* Trucks, drivers: Comet 11; IR 2.
* Weekday coverage: Comet 24 hours, maximum of four trucks; IR two vehicles for 121/2 hours, on-call coverage other hours.
* Weekend coverage: Comet, one midday shift Saturdays and Sundays; IR 1 unit on call.
* Year started: Comet 1997; IR 1993.
* Yearly budget: Comet $1.5 million; IR $677,000 (drivers, trucks and cost of operating traffic management centers in both jurisdictions.)