Publications

Summary:
This chapter provides additional insight into the role of warehouse location in achieving sustainability targets and provides a novel comparison between delivery and personal travel for criteria pollutants.

Summary:
In an age of expanding online commerce, is home delivery greener than sending full truckloads of goods to stores and then customers driving to them? A detailed regional study finds compelling answers. Readers who were teenagers in the 1980s may remember driving to a Sam Goody store to buy music. You probably also remember your disappointment when sometimes the tape or CD wasn’t in stock when you arrived. Perhaps you returned to your car and headed for Tower Records to...

Summary:
Travel demand models are used to aid infrastructure investment and transportation policy decisions. Unfortunately, these models were built primarily to reflect passenger travel and most models in use by public agencies have poorly developed freight components. Freight transportation is an important piece of regional planning, so regional models should be improved to more accurately capture freight traffic.

Summary:
This article describes the promise of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in transportation-related applications. Small UAVs are increasingly affordable, easy to transport and launch, and can be equipped with cameras that provide information usable for transportation agencies. Potential uses of UAVs include accident scene photography, surveying, security inspections, construction data collection, and monitoring the condition and congestion of roadways.

Summary:
The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology for forecasting freeway vehicle travel time reliability for transportation planning using probe GPS data. Travel time reliability is measured using the coefficient of variation of the GPS spot (instantaneous) speed distribution. The proposed approach establishes relationships between travel time reliability and roadway traffic density in order to forecast reliability given future traffic conditions.

Summary:
The safety effects of cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) are mostly unknown and associated with uncertainties, because these systems represent emerging technology. This study proposes a bowtie analysis as a conceptual framework for evaluating the safety effect of cooperative intelligent transport systems. These seek to prevent road traffic accidents or mitigate their consequences.

Summary:
Research has established a potential to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by replacing passenger travel for shopping with delivery service, and a few studies have indicated CO2 emissions can also be reduced. However, that research has mostly focused on urban locations and has not addressed criteria pollutants.

Summary:
The outer coast of Washington State is exposed to significant seismic and tsunami hazards. A Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ) event is expected to cause high earthquake intensities and tsunami inundation resulting in considerable infrastructure loss, inundation of developed land, and degraded functioning of coastal communities. One area of particular concern is Pacific County, located in southwest Washington, where over 85% of the population is expected to experience severe shaking intensities.

Summary:
Freight Performance Measures (FPM) are of interest to transportation planning agencies. One of the key tools that aids in the study of freight system activity is the data from Global Positioning System (GPS) devices located in trucks and cars. While commercially available GPS data has a common basic output format, the level of aggregation of the raw data, impacts the data’s ultimate usability and applications.

Summary:
This report provides a guidebook for conducting benefit-cost analyses of proposed infrastructure investments on multimodal, multi-jurisdictional freight corridors for public and private decision-makers and other stakeholders at local, state, regional, and national levels to arrive at more informed investment decisions.

Summary:
This report summarizes the work completed under the SHRP2 (Strategic Highway Research Program 2) Local Freight Data program. Supply chain firm interviews and truck counts were conducted to better understand the Food Distribution System in the Puget Sound. Interviews explored key business challenges, operations, and potential responses to natural gas incentives. Truck counts were conducted at grocery stores, and observations included truck type, time of day, stop duration, and parking behavior.

Summary:
Bicycling is being encouraged across the US and the world as a low-impact, environmentally friendly mode of transportation. In the US, many states and cities, especially cities facing congestion issues, are encouraging cycling as an alternative to automobiles. However, as cities grow and consumption increases, freight traffic in cities will increase as well, leading to higher amounts of interactions between cyclists and trucks.

Summary:
While recent urban planning efforts have focused on the management of growth into developed areas, the research community has not examined the impacts of these development patterns on urban goods movement. Successful implementation of growth strategies has multiple environmental and social benefits but also raises the demand for intra-urban goods movement, potentially increasing conflicts between modes of travel and worsening air quality.

Summary:
Smart growth design, a strategy for improving the quality of life in urban areas, has typically focused on the areas of passenger travel, land use and nonmotorized transport adoption. The role of goods movement is often ignored in discussions of smart growth. This article reports on National Cooperative Freight Research Program (NCFRP) Report 24, which addresses the importance of the relationship between smart growth and goods movement.

Summary:
While researchers have found relationships between passenger vehicle travel and smart growth development patterns, similar relationships have not been extensively studied between urban form and goods movement trip-making patterns. In rural areas, where shopping choice is more limited, goods movement delivery has the potential to be relatively more important than in more urban areas.