A Tradeoff Analysis for Different Damage Fee Structures for Offsetting Overweight Truck Damage Costs

The rapid growth of freight traffic is now taxing a significant number of the United States national freight corridors. This additional demand accompanied by trucks over legal limits has been accelerating infrastructure deterioration at a faster rate than anticipated. Concurrent with this demand, sufficient revenues to offset such damage on freight corridors are not collected by the states. To develop effective policies to overcome this situation, decision makers (DMs) must develop policy options considering multiple conflicting objectives simultaneously. In this study, a multiobjective analysis approach is applied to address the conflicting objectives associated with overweight freight truck mobility and to identify best possible permit fee options as well as generate detailed tradeoffs between these options. In this paper, a case study is presented with two objectives: the minimization of unpaid damage associated with overweight freight trucks and the minimization of overweight damage fee. A set of overweight fee options is generated with the associated tradeoffs. The tradeoff analysis reveals that increasing the flat overweight damage fee by $1 from $40 would reduce the unpaid damages to bridges and pavement equivalent to $14.8 million annually in South Carolina with a high elasticity of demand. Similarly, in the axle-based fee structure, increasing the axle-based overweight damage fee by on average $1 from the average axle-based damage fee of $40 would reduce the unpaid damages to bridges and pavement equivalent to $14.2 million annually in South Carolina. These types of tradeoff analyses provide valuable information to DMs to select an appropriate type and level of fee structure for overweight trucks.

• 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:
  • Dey, Kakan
  • Chowdhury, Mashrur
  • Wiecek, Margaret M
• 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: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 20p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Alternatives analysis; Case studies; Fees; Freight transportation; Overweight loads; Permits; Trucks
• Geographic Terms: South Carolina
• Subject Areas: Finance; Freight Transportation; Highways; I10: Economics and Administration;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01516458
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-2972
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 28 2014 1:32PM