Publications

Summary:
Onboard monitoring systems (OBMSs) can be used in commercial vehicle operations to monitor driving behavior, to enhance safety. Although improved safety produces an economic benefit to carriers, understanding how this benefit compares with the cost of the system is an important factor for carrier acceptance. In addition to the safety benefits provided by the use of OBMSs, operational improvements may have economic benefits.

Summary:
The adoption of defensible performance measures and establishment of proven results has become a necessity of many state Transportation Departments. A major factor in demonstrating results is the impact a transportation infrastructure improvement project has on the region’s economic climate.

Summary:
The proposed research will address an emerging need by local, state and regional transportation planners and policymakers to better understand the transportation characteristics, functions and dynamics of ocean port-to-handling facility and handling facility-to-final market freight movements. The research will also address a gap in the academic literature for freight transportation models that capture underlying economic forces.

Summary:
The ability to fully understand and accurately characterize freight vehicle route choices is important in helping to inform regional and state decisions. This project recommends improvements to WSDOT’s Statewide Freight GIS Network Model to more accurately characterize freight vehicle route choice. This capability, when combined with regional and sub-national commodity flow data, will be a key attribute of an effective statewide freight modeling system.

Summary:
As available data has increased and as the national transportation funding bills have moved toward objective evaluation, departments of transportation (DOTs) throughout the country have begun to develop tools to measure the impacts of different projects. Increasingly, DOTs recognize the freight transportation system is necessarily multimodal. However, few DOTs have clearly stated objective tools to make multimodal freight project comparisons.

Summary:
In the face of many risks of disruptions to our transportation system, including natural disasters, inclement weather, terrorist acts, work stoppages, and other potential transportation disruptions, it is imperative for freight transportation system partners to plan a transportation system that can recover quickly from disruption and to prevent long-term negative economic consequences to state and regional economies.

Summary:
Purpose: The increasing growth of e-commerce has been putting pressure on local governments to rethink how they manage street curb parking and alley operations for trucks and other delivery vehicles.

Summary:
This study examines civil engineering students’ perceptions of freight transportation and its impacts on the environment and society.

Summary:
In many regions throughout the world, freight models are used to aid infrastructure investment and policy decisions. Since freight is such an integral part of efficient supply chains, more realistic transportation models can be of greater assistance. Transportation models in general have been moving away from the traditional four-step model into activity-based and supply chain-based models. Personal transportation models take into consideration household demographics and why families travel.

Summary:
The University of Washington (UW), Washington State University (WSU), and Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) recently developed a multi-modal statewide geographic information system (GIS) model that can help the state prioritize strategies that protect industries most vulnerable to disruptions, supporting economic activity in the state and increasing economic resilience.

Summary:
This research offers a novel formulation for including emissions into fleet assignment and vehicle routing and for the trade-offs faced by fleet operators between cost, emissions, and service quality. This approach enables evaluation of the impact of a variety of internal changes (e.g. time window schemes) and external policies (e.g. spatial restrictions), and enables comparisons of the relative impacts on fleet emissions.

Summary:
This report presents a commercial vehicle profile of transportation patterns and a commodity profile of the primary border crossing along the Western Cascade border region of southwest British Columbia, Canada, and northwest Washington, United States, in particular the corridor between the urban areas of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle, Washington.

Summary:
This article provides an overview of the applications of operations research (OR) techniques to marine container terminals. The article begins by providing a summary of marine container terminal operations. Following this, a series of decision problems are identified, to which OR techniques have been applied. These include quayside, yard, and landside decision problems. In each section, the problems, technical approaches, and outcomes are described.

Summary:
In order to support WSDOT in development of the Washington State Freight Mobility Plan, this document presents recommendations for criteria to be used in defining the Washington state truck intermodal network. The state does not have an existing definition of the freight truck-intermodal system.

Summary:
This report presents a pilot test of a common carrier smart locker system — a promising strategy to reduce truck trip and failed first delivery attempts in urban buildings. The Urban Freight Lab tested this system in the 62-story Seattle Municipal Tower skyscraper in downtown Seattle.