Publications

Summary:
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.

Summary:
This paper describes the population characteristics in the drayage trucking population of the Port of Seattle as determined by the 2013 Truck Driver Survey. The 2013 Truck Driver Survey was created to give the Port of Seattle more information on the trip destinations, working conditions, equipment, and economics of truck drivers serving the Port of Seattle, so that policymakers creating regulations affecting trucking at the port could be better informed about the trucking population.

Summary:
The warehousing industry experienced a period of rapid growth from 1998 to 2009. This paper compares how the geographic distribution of warehouses changed in both the Los Angeles and Seattle Metropolitan Areas over that time period. These two west coast cities were chosen due to their geographic spread and proximity to major ports as well as their difference in size.

Summary:
This paper quantifies the benefits to drayage trucks and container terminals from a data-sharing strategy designed to improve operations at the drayage truck-container terminal interface. This paper proposes a simple rule for using truck information to reduce container rehandling work and suggests a method for evaluating yard crane productivity and truck transaction time.

Summary:
As available data have increased and as the national transportation funding bills have moved toward objective evaluation, departments of transportation (DOTs) throughout the United States have begun to develop tools to attempt to measure the effects of different projects. Increasingly, DOTs recognize that the freight transportation system is necessarily multimodal. However, no DOTs have clearly stated objective tools with which to evaluate multimodal freight project comparisons.

Summary:
Activities of commercial vehicles just before or just following international border crossings are not well understood. Logistical responses to border crossings are believed to increase miles traveled empty, total travel times, and total vehicle emissions.

Summary:
This paper introduces a novel quay crane design, a double girder bridge crane (DGBC). DGBC is capable of handling containers of two adjacent bays simultaneously, avoiding crane collisions, saving traveling and repositioning costs, and eventually improving terminal efficiency. This problem is formulated as a resource-constrained project scheduling to minimize the maximum completion time.

Summary:
This paper proposes a method for calculating both the direct freight benefits and the larger economic impacts of transportation projects. The identified direct freight benefits included in the methodology are travel time savings, operating cost savings, and environmental impacts. These are estimated using regional travel demand models (TDM) and additional factors. Economic impacts are estimated using a regional Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model.

Summary:
The adoption of defensible performance measures and establishment of proven results has become a necessity of many state Transportation Departments. A major factor in demonstrating results is the impact a transportation infrastructure improvement project has on the region’s economic climate.

Summary:
Onboard monitoring systems (OBMSs) can be used in commercial vehicle operations to monitor driving behavior, to enhance safety. Although improved safety produces an economic benefit to carriers, understanding how this benefit compares with the cost of the system is an important factor for carrier acceptance. In addition to the safety benefits provided by the use of OBMSs, operational improvements may have economic benefits.

Summary:
This paper describes the development of a systematic methodology for identifying and ranking bottlenecks using probe data collected by commercial global positioning system fleet management devices mounted on trucks. These data are processed in a geographic information system and assigned to a roadway network to provide performance measures for individual segments.

Summary:
Currently, knowledge of actual freight flows in the US is insufficient at a level of geographic resolution that permits corridor-level freight transportation analysis and planning. Commodity specific origins, destinations, and routes are typically estimated from four-step models or commodity flow models. At a sub-regional level, both of these families of models are built on important assumptions driven by the limited availability of data.

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:
This study reviews the impact of public transit network layout (TNL) on resident mode choice. The review of TNL as a factor uses variables divided into three groups: a variable set without considering the TNL, one considering TNL from the zone level, and one considering TNL from the individual level. Using Baoding’s travel survey data, a Multinomial Logit (MNL) model is used, and the parameter estimation result shows that TNL has significant effect on resident mode choice. Based on parameter...

Summary:
Future reauthorizations of the federal transportation bill will require a comprehensive and quantitative analysis of the freight benefits of proposed freight system projects.