Commercial Vehicle Road Pricing: Lessons Learned in Southern California

This paper makes three important contributions to the body of literature documenting the impact of pricing on freight transportation. First, it compares the variations in the willingness-to-pay by evaluating the likelihood of switching to a different route or to off-peak periods. Second, it uses a respondent driven approach to understand the relationship between establishments’ commercial vehicle traffic decision-making and their role in the logistics supply chain. Third, it serves as a blueprint for regions interested in quantifying the likely impact of freeway, truck lane, cordon or mileage-based pricing strategies on commercial vehicle travel behavior. The findings come from a survey conducted in the Southern California region where 806 establishments that contribute to commercial vehicle traffic including for-hire carriers; service providers; and shippers and receivers were recruited. Around 95 percent of carriers reported controlling only routing decisions while every shipper and receiver that does not own a truck reported making only time-of-day of decisions. Respondents were asked to describe their current travel decisions as well as their intended decisions (route and/or time-of-day change) under road pricing. Sixty percent of respondents chose the non-tolled route while 80 percent of respondents chose to switch to off-peak periods. Results indicate that the willingness-to-pay varies by type of decision (route or time-of-day), the land use at the pick-up end and the likely on-time performance of the route. The estimated route choice values of time range from $85 to $105 while the time-of-day choice values of time range from $9 to $22. As expected, this pattern occurs because a majority of carriers who have a high value of time only control route.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB50 Transportation Planning Applications.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Musti, Sashank
  • Komanduri, Anurag
  • Proussaloglou, Kimon
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: References; Tables;
• Pagination: 12p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Commercial vehicles; Decision making; Freight transportation; Off peak periods; Road pricing; Route choice; Surveys; Travel behavior
• Geographic Terms: Southern California
• Subject Areas: Finance; Freight Transportation; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I10: Economics and Administration; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01516399
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-3957
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 28 2014 1:32PM