Publications

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:
This paper quantifies the benefits to drayage trucks and container terminals from a data-sharing strategy designed to improve operations at the drayage truck-container terminal interface. This paper proposes a simple rule for using truck information to reduce container rehandling work and suggests a method for evaluating yard crane productivity and truck transaction time.

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:
This article will explore the reliability of the port drayage network. Port drayage is an important component of the marine intermodal system and affects the efficiency of the intermodal supply chain. Sharing and utilizing drayage truck arrival information could improve both port drayage and port operational efficiency. In this article two reliability measures are used to evaluate how the travel time reliability changes with trip origins and across drayage networks.

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:
North American rail terminals need productivity improvements to handle increasing rail volumes and improve terminal performance. This paper examines the benefits of double cycling in wide-span gantry terminals that use automated transfer management systems.

Summary:
Future reauthorizations of the federal transportation bill will require a comprehensive and quantitative analysis of the freight benefits of proposed freight system projects.

Summary:
Shippers and motor carriers are impacted by and react differently to travel time variability due to their positions within the supply chain and end goals. Through interviews and focus groups these differences have been further examined. Shippers, defined here as entities that send or receive goods, but do not provide the transportation themselves, are most often concerned with longer-term disruptions, which are typically considered within the context of transportation system resilience.

Summary:
This paper proposes a method for calculating both the direct freight benefits and the larger economic impacts of transportation projects. The identified direct freight benefits included in the methodology are travel time savings, operating cost savings, and environmental impacts. These are estimated using regional travel demand models (TDM) and additional factors. Economic impacts are estimated using a regional Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model.

Summary:
Currently, knowledge of actual freight flows in the US is insufficient at a level of geographic resolution that permits corridor-level freight transportation analysis and planning. Commodity specific origins, destinations, and routes are typically estimated from four-step models or commodity flow models. At a sub-regional level, both of these families of models are built on important assumptions driven by the limited availability of data.

Summary:
The demand for truck transportation increases alongside growth in population and economic activity. As both truck and passenger traffic outstrip roadway capacity, the result is congestion, which the freight community experiences as truck bottlenecks. This NCHRP project produced a Guidebook that provides state-of-the-practice information to transportation professionals on practices and measures for identifying, classifying, evaluating, and mitigating truck freight bottlenecks.

Summary:
This article identifies the truck routing priorities of freight companies through a survey of Washington state shippers, carriers, and receivers. To elicit these priorities, the survey prompted the respondents to rate 15 items believed to affect route choice decision making with respect to each item’s influence on route choice.