Identifying Truck Route Choice Priorities: The Implications for Travel Models

This article identifies the truck routing priorities of freight companies through a survey of Washington state shippers, carriers, and receivers. To elicit these priorities, the survey prompted the respondents to rate 15 items believed to affect route choice decision making with respect to each item’s influence on route choice. Item response theory (IRT) and latent class analysis (LCA) highlights priorities that were common among all survey respondents and priorities that were different among the sample.

Minimizing cost and meeting customer requirements were priorities for all. The influence of other items such as road grade, hours of service limits, and driver availability depended on whether the respondent was best described as a long-haul, local-regional, or urban trucking provider. These three classes of companies were derived from the LCA, and each class has a distinct response pattern to the 15 routing items. This result suggests that truck routing priorities are not constant and uniform across a state’s trucking industry but rather variable and largely dependent on trip length. The paper concludes with practical recommendations as to how these priorities can be implemented within a truck routing model.