Publications

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

Summary:
The ability to fully understand and accurately characterize freight vehicle route choices is important in helping to inform regional and state decisions. This project recommends improvements to WSDOT’s Statewide Freight GIS Network Model to more accurately characterize freight vehicle route choice. This capability, when combined with regional and sub-national commodity flow data, will be a key attribute of an effective statewide freight modeling system.

Summary:
The effective and efficient movement of freight is essential to the economic well-being of our country but freight transport also adversely impacts our society by contributing to a large number of crashes, including those resulting in injuries and fatalities.

Summary:
A factor that influences transit ridership but has not received much attention from researchers is weather. This paper examines the effects of weather on bus ridership in Pierce County, Washington, for the years 2006–2008. Separate ordinary least squares regression models were estimated for each season, as weather conditions may have different effects depending on the time of year. Four weather variables were considered: wind, temperature, rain, and snow.

Summary:
This paper compares the CO2 emissions from the use of personal vehicles to shared-use vehicles for grocery shopping in Seattle, Washington. The research builds on existing literature by considering the importance of modeling the logistical details of routing and scheduling, and by comparing the results of an American case study to existing European case studies.

Summary:
Shippers and motor carriers are impacted by and react differently to travel time variability due to their positions within the supply chain and end goals. Through interviews and focus groups these differences have been further examined. Shippers, defined here as entities that send or receive goods, but do not provide the transportation themselves, are most often concerned with longer-term disruptions, which are typically considered within the context of transportation system resilience.

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:
This project developed four new activity‐based transportation courses including “Traffic Signal Systems Operations and Design”, “Understanding and Communicating Transportation Data”, “Introduction to Freight Transportation”, and “Rural Highway Design and Safety”. The courses are learner‐centered in which activities completed by students form the basis for their learning. The courses were offered fourteen times to a total of 195 students.

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 paper presents a systematic methodology for identifying and ranking bottlenecks using probe data collected by commercial GPS fleet management devices. This methodology is based on the hypotheses that truck speed distributions can be represented by either a unimodal or bimodal probability density function, and it proposes a new reliability measure for evaluating roadway performance.

Summary:
As commercial vehicle activity grows, the environmental impacts of these movements have increasing negative effects, particularly in urban areas. The transportation sector is the largest producer of CO2 emissions in the United States, by end-use sector, accounting for 32% of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion in 2008.

Summary:
Growing pressure to limit greenhouse gas emissions is changing the way businesses operate. This paper presents the trade-offs between cost, service quality (represented by time window guarantees), and emissions of an urban pickup and delivery system under these changing pressures. A model, developed by the authors in ArcGIS, is used to evaluate these trade-offs for a specific case study involving a real fleet with specific operational characteristics.

Summary:
Global positioning systems (GPS) used for fleet management by trucking companies provide probe data that can support a truck performance-monitoring program. This paper discusses the steps taken to acquire fleet management data and then process those data so they can eventually be used for a network-based truck performance measures program.

Summary:
Container terminals are important intermodal interfaces between marine and land transport networks. These interfaces have historically been sources of congestion and logistical inefficiencies. Exacerbated by growing trade volumes, the terminals have become bottlenecks in the port-related supply chain. This research explores using truck arrival information to integrate drayage truck and container terminal operations and improve intermodal system efficiency.