Documenting Truck Activity Times at International Border Crossings

In a previous report the authors described their geo-fence approach for determining truck activity times at the United States-Canadian border. The approach took advantage of onboard position, timing, and communication systems already installed on many truck fleets. In this study, the authors collected additional data and processed these and other recently collected data to produce updated activity times. The data collection and processing effort is summarized in Section 2. Parallel to past efforts, Transport Canada (TC) and the Ontario Ministry of Transportation were using a Bluetooth-based approach to collect truck data at these major border crossings. In the project described in this report, the authors refined and expanded the empirical comparisons between their single carrier, geo-fence based crossing times and the TC crossing times determined from the broader population of carriers using the Bluetooth-based approach. The reprocessed data also allowed a better temporal match of “approximately concurrent” crossings in the two datasets. In Section 3, the authors present the revised investigations conducted with these reprocessed data and additional investigations that confirm the strong positive associations seen in the previous investigation for both directions of traffic at the Ambassador Bridge facility and for the Ontario-to-Michigan direction at the Blue Water Bridge facility. The authors also conducted multiple empirical studies using the newly processed data. In Section 4, empirical results are presented that quantify changes in geo-fence times resulting from a change in inspection facilities for Canada-bound traffic at the Blue Water Bridge, document the effect on truck times of the Black River Bridge construction project, identify systematic changes to duty free times for US bound trucks, and portray time-of-day patterns in times incurred on surface streets in Windsor.

• Record URL:
  http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/nextrans/assets/pdfs/Final%20Report_087OY04_%20McCord%20et%20al_Truck%20Activity.pdf
• 
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This document was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, University Transportation Centers Program.
• Corporate Authors:

  NEXTRANS

  Purdue University
  3000 Kent Avenue
  Lafayette, IN  United States  47906-1075

  Research and Innovative Technology Administration

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• Authors:
  • McCord, Mark R
  • Brooks, Colin N
  • Goel, Prem
  • Zaetz, Jiaqi
  • Sell, Nicole
  • Dean, David
  • Jessee, Nathanial
• Publication Date: 2014-4-2

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; Photos; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 53p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bluetooth technology; Data collection; Freight traffic; Information processing; International borders; Travel time; Truck traffic
• Geographic Terms: United States-Canada Border
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Freight Transportation; Highways; Motor Carriers; Operations and Traffic Management; I70: Traffic and Transport;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01526378
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 087OY04
• Contract Numbers: DTRT07-G-005
• Files: UTC, TRIS, RITA, ATRI, USDOT
• Created Date: May 28 2014 3:26PM