Publications

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.

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:
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) partnered with the University of Washington to explore how commercial vehicle parking in Seattle’s downtown area affects the safety of bicyclists. The hypothesis was that increased truck access to SDOT’s commercial vehicle loading zones (CVLZs) can positively contribute to bicycle safety.

Summary:
While recent urban planning efforts have focused on the 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 also raises the demand for intra-urban goods movement, potentially increasing conflicts between modes of travel and worsening air quality.

Summary:
This report documents the use of the National Performance Monitoring Research Data Set (NPMRDS) for the computation of freight performance measures on Interstate highways in Washington state. The report documents the data availability and specific data quality issues identified with NPMRDS. It then describes a recommended initial set of quality assurance tests that are needed before WSDOT begins producing freight performance measures.

Summary:
Truck probe data collected by global positioning system (GPS) devices has gained increased attention as a source of truck mobility data, including measuring truck travel time reliability. Most reliability studies that apply GPS data are based on travel time observations retrieved from GPS data. The major challenges to using GPS data are small, nonrandom observation sets and low reading frequency.

Summary:
Predicting truck (heavy vehicle) travel time is a principal component of freight project prioritization and planning. However, most existing travel time prediction models are designed for passenger vehicles and fail to make truck specific forecasts or use truck specific data. Little is known about the impact of this limitation, or how truck travel time prediction could be improved in response to freight investments with an improved methodology.

Summary:
There is little research on the behavioral interaction between bicycle lanes and commercial vehicle loading zones (CVLZ) in the United States. These interactions are important to understand, to preempt increasing conflicts between truckers and bicyclists. In this study, a bicycling simulator experiment examined bicycle and truck interactions. The experiment was successfully completed by 48 participants.

Summary:
Freight systems are a critical yet complex component of the transportation domain. Understanding the dynamic of freight movements will help in better management of freight demand and eventually improve freight system efficiency. This paper presents a series of data-mining algorithms to extract an individual truck’s trip-chaining information from multi-day GPS data.

Summary:
Freight transport is a challenging economic sector, as it is essential for the functioning of production and distribution systems but and the same time is at the origin of many nuisances such as congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, pollution and noise. When responding to these issues, planners dispose nowadays of a growing body of freight data that can be used for the implementation of policies towards achieving smart mobility.

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].