Investigation of Truck Traffic Versus Placement of Inspection Facilities for Enforcement of Overweight Trucks in California

The volume of commercial truck traffic, as well as the associated volume of overweight trucks, is growing every year, imposing a great challenge to roadway maintenance as well as truck weight enforcement. To support the effective deployment of enforcement facilities in California, California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) are developing strategies to identify where the future vehicle inspection facilities should be located so as to maximize their effectiveness in enforcement. To address this need, a project was initiated to develop a deployment strategy by identifying areas that are most in need of future facilities as well as where to locate future facilities in the identified areas so as to minimize alternative routes overweight trucks could use to bypass the facilities. This paper describes the efforts undertaken to identify areas that have high truck incidents but are lack of effective enforcement. The truck traffic data are analyzed to identify areas with high truck incidents while locations of the existing facilities are compared against routes with heavy truck traffic to evaluate the effectiveness of the enforcement coverage. Candidate areas are identified by examining the truck traffic and the facilities along each corridor, and a two-dimensional evaluation method using Google Earth is devised to provide a comprehensive evaluation. The identified areas will facilitate Caltrans to determine which areas are most problematic and should be equipped with future facilities. The approach described in this paper may also serve as an example for evaluating the enforcement coverage and identifying high risk areas in other states.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT055 Truck Size and Weight
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Huang, Jihua
  • Chan, Ching-Yao
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2012-1-22 to 2012-1-26
• Date: 2012

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: TRB 91st Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Law enforcement; Location; Size and weight regulations; Traffic incidents; Truck traffic; Weigh stations
• Geographic Terms: California
• Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Operations and Traffic Management; I70: Traffic and Transport;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01373234
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 12-2135
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Jun 21 2012 2:06PM