Publications

Summary:
As available data has increased and as the national transportation funding bills have moved toward objective evaluation, departments of transportation (DOTs) throughout the country have begun to develop tools to measure the impacts of different projects. Increasingly, DOTs recognize the freight transportation system is necessarily multimodal. However, few DOTs have clearly stated objective tools to make multimodal freight project comparisons.

Summary:
Roadway tolls are designed to raise revenue to fund transportation investments and manage travel demand and as such may affect transportation system performance and route choice. Yet, limited research has quantified the impact of tolling on truck speed and route choice because of the lack of truck-specific movement data.

Summary:
This report discusses the travel costs associated with the closure of roads in the greater Centralia/Chehalis, Washington region due to 100-year flood conditions starting on the Chehalis River. The costs were computed for roadway closures on I-5, US 12, and SR 6, and are based on estimated road closure durations supplied by WSDOT. The computed costs are only those directly related to travel that would otherwise have occurred on the roads affected by the flooding closures.

Summary:
While researchers have found relationships between passenger vehicle travel and smart growth development patterns, similar relationships have not been extensively studied between urban form and goods movement trip-making patterns. In rural areas, where shopping choice is more limited, goods movement delivery has the potential to be relatively more important than in more urban areas.

Summary:
Smart growth design, a strategy for improving the quality of life in urban areas, has typically focused on the areas of passenger travel, land use and nonmotorized transport adoption. The role of goods movement is often ignored in discussions of smart growth. This article reports on National Cooperative Freight Research Program (NCFRP) Report 24, which addresses the importance of the relationship between smart growth and goods movement.

Summary:
Travel demand models are used to aid infrastructure investment and transportation policy decisions. Unfortunately, these models were built primarily to reflect passenger travel and most models in use by public agencies have poorly developed freight components. Freight transportation is an important piece of regional planning, so regional models should be improved to more accurately capture freight traffic.

Summary:
The Port of Seattle surveyed drayage truckers serving the port in 2006, 2008, and surveyed drivers again in 2013 in partnership with the University of Washington. This thesis describes the methodology used to survey drayage drivers at the Port of Seattle, describes the economic conditions of drayage drivers at the port and changes in economic conditions since previous surveys, and attempts to model driver earnings based on other driver characteristics.

Summary:
This study employs a multilevel model to compare the influence of land use on transportation emissions in urban and suburban areas when considering trip speed and vehicle characteristics.

Summary:
Global positioning system (GPS) devices that are installed in trucks and used for fleet management are increasingly common. Raw data from these devices present an opportunity for public agencies to use these trucks as probe vehicles to better monitor roadway operations and to quantify transportation system efficiency.

Summary:
Worldwide, awareness has been raised about the dangers of growing greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, transportation is a key contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. American and European researchers have identified a potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by replacing passenger vehicle travel with delivery service.

Summary:
While recent urban planning efforts have focused on smart growth development and management of growth into developed areas, the research community has not examined the impacts of these development patterns on urban goods movement. Successful implementation of growth strategies has multiple environmental and social benefits, but it also raises the demand for intraurban goods movement, potentially increasing conflicts between modes of travel and worsening air quality.

Summary:
This chapter provides additional insight into the role of warehouse location in achieving sustainability targets and provides a novel comparison between delivery and personal travel for criteria pollutants.

Summary:
Efficient and reliable goods movement via our nation’s highway system is critical to the nation’s economy and quality of life. Truck mobility is one of the key performance measures for evaluating the conditions of goods movement and supporting freight planning. Truck GPS data can be useful in developing truck mobility measures and providing insights into freight planning.

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.

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.