Global Positioning System-Based Truck Modelling for Regional Travel Demand Forecasting

Freight movement complexity and a lack of truck trip data limits freight modelling’s practicality and application. Most publicly available truck movement data is reported at higher geographical levels than detailed analysis and modelling require. The current Freight Analysis Framework (FAF) provides freight data based on the Commodity Flow Survey (CFS) conducted every five years with commercial vehicle data collected from state departments of transportation (DOT) and other proprietary data sources. Commercially available commodity flow databases (e.g., Global Insight’s TRANSEARCH) are excessively expensive, and this data set also provides aggregate information on commodity shipments between selected major cities. However, this data set provides limited information on shipments into smaller geographies. Freight transportation surveys such as roadside/intercept surveys, focus and stakeholder group surveys, and commodity flow surveys are time-consuming and require a great amount of labor to geocode the trip origins and destinations. This study shows a truck modelling effort utilizing real-time global positioning system (GPS) truck data with a belief that GPS-based databases may provide detailed and disaggregate data for regional freight modelling. Eight weeks of GPS data for 5,000 different trucks in 2011 (two weeks in four seasons) for the Atlanta and Birmingham metropolitan planning organizations (MPO) was collected and incorporated with other datasets. Notably, GPS data can provide detailed origin-destination (O-D) information, routes and corridors, operating speeds, travel times, and flows. This study explores various possible ways that a GPS-based truck movement data can contribute to freight demand forecasts at the state and regional levels.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • Alternate title: Global Positioning System-Based Truck Modeling for Regional Travel Demand Forecasting. This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADA10 Statewide Multimodal Transportation Planning.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Lee, David
  • Ross, Catherine L
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 15p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Commodity flow; Forecasting; Freight transportation; Global Positioning System; Metropolitan planning organizations; Origin and destination; Travel demand; Trucks
• Identifier Terms: Freight Analysis Framework
• Geographic Terms: Atlanta (Georgia); Birmingham (Alabama)
• Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Highways; Motor Carriers; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01554420
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-4658
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 26 2015 9:49AM