Impacts of Nighttime-Only Truck Traffic Regulation on Pavement Performance

With the increasing congestion and pollution in metropolitan areas, various types of regulations have been applied to control truck traffic. Restricting truck traffic to nighttime only hours is one commonly used policy and its feasibility has been recently discussed for New York City. The advantages of this policy are obvious to logistics, environmental and traffic operations. However, how this policy impacts load-bearing infrastructure is rarely studied. This paper attempts to evaluate how the nighttime only policy for truck traffic impacts pavement performance. Differences of average temperature and travel speed between daytime and nighttime are recognized as the potential factors affecting pavement performance when this regulation is applied. In addition, the gross weight limit for the nighttime only regulation is considered. The Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG) simulation is applied on three pavement sections in the three largest cities in the United States: New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. Different combinations of temperature, travel speed and gross weight are investigated for different scenarios. Based on statistical analysis using response surface methodology, it is found that the regulation may produce significant performance difference on total rutting and alligator cracking, but not roughness. In general, nighttime only truck traffic regulation leads to better pavement performance. Moreover, with the implementation of this regulation, an increase of truck gross weight limit by up to 44% is acceptable because it does not cause excessive pavement damage compared with the scenario where the regulation is not in effect.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AFD60 Flexible Pavement Design
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Qiu, Shi
  • Xiao, Danny X
  • Wang, Kelvin C P
  • Wang, Wenjuan
  • Hall, Kevin D
  • Moravec, Mike M
• 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: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 91st Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Alligator cracking; Average travel speed; Metropolitan areas; Night; Pavement distress; Pavements; Rutting; Surface course (Pavements); Traffic regulations; Truck traffic
• Identifier Terms: Mechanistic-Empirical Pavement Design Guide
• Geographic Terms: Chicago (Illinois); Los Angeles (California); New York (New York)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Pavements; I31: Bituminous Binders and Materials; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01373570
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 12-3884
• Files: TRIS, TRB
• Created Date: Jun 25 2012 9:27AM