Traditional automatic incident detection methods such as artificial neural networks, backpropagation neural network, and Markov chains are not suitable for addressing the incident detection problem of rural roads in China which have a relatively high accident rate and a low reaction speed caused by the character of small traffic volume. This study applies the support vector machine (SVM) and parameter sensitivity analysis methods to build an accident detection algorithm in a rural road condition, based on real-time data collected in a field experiment. The sensitivity of four parameters (speed, front distance, vehicle group time interval, and free driving ratio) is analyzed, and the data sets of two parameters with a significant sensitivity are chosen to form the traffic state feature vector. The SVM and k-fold cross validation (K-CV) methods are used to build the accident detection algorithm, which shows an excellent performance in detection accuracy (98.15% of the training data set and 87.5% of the testing data set). Therefore, the problem of low incident reaction speed of rural roads in China could be solved to some extent.