Data on road traffic incidents for Sydney greater metropolitan area

A road network aims to facilitate the movement of commuters and goods in a safe, economical, and efficient way that contributes to growth in the economy. Road traffic incidents (RTIs), such as crashes, vehicle breakdowns, hazards, etc., are unexpected events that cause severe traffic congestion, unreliability, and pollution. The existing open-source RTI databases provide information on only a single type of incident, i.e., crashes that too focusing on the fatal ones. Other incidents, such as vehicle breakdowns, are underreported to the transport authorities as they are less severe than road traffic crashes. However, traffic congestion induced by on-road breakdowns is non-trivial, as reported by past studies. Furthermore, the existing RTI databases lack information on incident duration, a variable that indicates the time it takes for the authorities to clear the incident site and bring traffic operations back to normalcy. The increase in duration may reflect either the severity of the incident or/and the delay in emergency services and thus becomes a key indicator for traffic and safety management. Therefore, this paper aims to present the RTI data of the Sydney Greater Metropolitan Area (GMA), Australia, which includes crashes and breakdowns, along with their duration, covering 5.5 years, starting from the 1(st) January 2017. The uniqueness of this data is that the RTI duration, i.e., the clearance time of every incident, is provided along with other details, such as vehicles involved, traffic conditions, advisories imposed, etc., over a larger area. Further, the secondary data corresponding to the road network, zonal information, socioeconomic attributes, and travel characteristics collected from various sources were also included. The curated data could be employed to examine the factors influencing RTIs at the micro (individual incident) and macroscopic (zonal) levels.