Publications

Summary:
Purpose: The increasing growth of e-commerce has been putting pressure on local governments to rethink how they manage street curb parking and alley operations for trucks and other delivery vehicles.

Summary:
This study examines civil engineering students’ perceptions of freight transportation and its impacts on the environment and society.

Summary:
In many regions throughout the world, freight models are used to aid infrastructure investment and policy decisions. Since freight is such an integral part of efficient supply chains, more realistic transportation models can be of greater assistance. Transportation models in general have been moving away from the traditional four-step model into activity-based and supply chain-based models. Personal transportation models take into consideration household demographics and why families travel.

Summary:
The University of Washington (UW), Washington State University (WSU), and Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) recently developed a multi-modal statewide geographic information system (GIS) model that can help the state prioritize strategies that protect industries most vulnerable to disruptions, supporting economic activity in the state and increasing economic resilience.

Summary:
This research offers a novel formulation for including emissions into fleet assignment and vehicle routing and for the trade-offs faced by fleet operators between cost, emissions, and service quality. This approach enables evaluation of the impact of a variety of internal changes (e.g. time window schemes) and external policies (e.g. spatial restrictions), and enables comparisons of the relative impacts on fleet emissions.

Summary:
This report presents a commercial vehicle profile of transportation patterns and a commodity profile of the primary border crossing along the Western Cascade border region of southwest British Columbia, Canada, and northwest Washington, United States, in particular the corridor between the urban areas of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Seattle, Washington.

Summary:
This article provides an overview of the applications of operations research (OR) techniques to marine container terminals. The article begins by providing a summary of marine container terminal operations. Following this, a series of decision problems are identified, to which OR techniques have been applied. These include quayside, yard, and landside decision problems. In each section, the problems, technical approaches, and outcomes are described.

Summary:
In order to support WSDOT in development of the Washington State Freight Mobility Plan, this document presents recommendations for criteria to be used in defining the Washington state truck intermodal network. The state does not have an existing definition of the freight truck-intermodal system.

Summary:
This report presents a pilot test of a common carrier smart locker system — a promising strategy to reduce truck trip and failed first delivery attempts in urban buildings. The Urban Freight Lab tested this system in the 62-story Seattle Municipal Tower skyscraper in downtown Seattle.

Summary:
In automated container terminals, rail based horizontal transfer systems are newly proposed and regarded to be more suitable to intermodal transportation [1]. However, improvements are required in operations scheduling in rail based transfer automated container terminals (RBT-ACT) to take advantage of the infrastructure improvement [2].

Summary:
Establishment level employment data indicate that the warehousing industry has experienced rapid growth and restructuring since 1998. This restructuring has resulted in geographic shifts at the national, regional, and local scales. Uneven growth in warehousing establishments across the Pacific Northwest has likely exerted a significant impact on the regional transportation system, but the extent of these transportation impacts remains unknown.

Summary:
This research, enabled by a data collection effort at the international commercial vehicle crossing at Blaine, WA, addressed three key questions regarding commercial vehicle border operations and near border operations. First, what are the unique features of border operations at Blaine, WA, that are not captured within the standard simulation tools (such as Border Wizard)?

Summary:
This article considers the effectiveness of a truck appointment system in improving yard efficiency in a container terminal. This research uses the truck appointment information obtained from an appointment system to improve import container retrieval operation and reduce container rehandles by adopting an advanced container location assignment algorithm. By reducing container rehandles, the terminal could improve yard crane productivity and reduce truck transaction time.

Summary:
The economic viability and well-being of Washington State is significantly influenced by the freight transportation system serving the region.

Summary:
Decisions to install public bike-share programs are increasingly based on ridership estimations, but the topography’s influence on ridership is rarely quantified. This research evaluated a geographic information system-based approach for estimating ridership that accounted for hills. Double-weighting a slope relative to other measures produces a realistic representation of the bicycling experience.