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Urban Freight Lab

Research Keyword: Freight performance metrics

Freight performance metrics are quantifiable measures used to assess and evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance of freight transportation and logistics operations.

Blog

Urban Freight in 2030: What Will We Measure?

URL: https://www.goodsmovement2030.com/post/what-will-we-measure
Publication: Goods Movement 2030: An Urban Freight Blog
Publication Date: 2022
Summary:

The meteoric rise in urban deliveries and the lingering societal effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are having dramatic implications for the future of business, climate, and cities.

Together with our collaborators and subject matter experts from across the logistics landscape, we are creating a collective vision for the urban freight system in 2030 and we are excited to present it in a new blog.

We have identified four topics surfacing in urban freight and six performance metrics around which we hope to see progress. Our topics for exploration are Electrification, Digital Transformation, Planning Streets for People and Goods, and Microfreight.

Complementing these, we have identified six priorities for progress by 2030: Reducing CO2 emissions, Reducing congestion, Reducing roadway fatalities, Increasing/improving protected spaces for vulnerable users, Making transparent the cost of delivery, and Improving equity.

Though not directly linked to our research topics, these metrics  serve as tangible measures to assess progress, or lack thereof, toward our collective vision of Urban Freight in 2030.

The Urban Freight Lab launched the Goods Movement 2030 Blog in 2022 to create a collective vision for the urban freight system in 2030. In this space, we are exploring emerging trends in last-mile delivery, asking big questions, and analyzing implications.

Authors: Urban Freight Lab
Recommended Citation:
"Urban Freight in 2030: What Will We Measure?" Goods Movement 2030 (blog). Urban Freight Lab, August 1, 2022. https://www.goodsmovement2030.com/post/what-will-we-measure
Blog

The Freight Space Race: Planning Streets for More Efficient & Sustainable Movement of People & Goods

URL: https://www.goodsmovement2030.com/post/freight-space-race
Publication Date: 2023
Summary:

Space is the scarcest resource in cities. How can we best use street space to do more for more street users?

Mention the “space race” and it tends to conjure up the Cold War-era competition between the United States and the then-USSR to “conquer” outer space. But at the winter meeting of the Urban Freight Lab (UFL), members heard about a different race playing out on our streets right under our noses. It’s what Philippe Crist of the International Transportation Forum (ITF) dubs the freight space race.

That race is about managing the competing demands for space in cities. Users of the space are competing to retain and grow space for their needs to improve deliveries, urban function, and residents’ well-being. For urban freight advocates it’s about making deliveries in cities less disruptive and more sustainable by focusing on the street space use of freight activities. It’s a race involving freight carriers, freight receivers, governments, and communities.

The freight space race isn’t new. But it’s been amplified and made more visible in the wake of the intertwined ecommerce boom and the Covid-19 pandemic, as planners in many cities scrambled to create public spaces for people through things like street closures, parks, and pedestrian ways.

Meantime, by and large, considering city space for goods has been an afterthought. And when goods delivery is considered, it tends to be siloed from the work of planning streets for people. So, there’s a freight plan, maybe. (Our research into 58 of the largest, densest, and fastest-growing cities found most do not have freight plans.) A bike plan. A transit plan. A pedestrian plan. But there’s nothing that integrates everything at the street level across all users.

This siloing hasn’t served cities or the freight sector particularly well. The rise of the “complete streets” concept is a rejoinder of sorts. (And, notably, UFL member Seattle Department of Transportation for the first time plans to create a multimodal and integrated 20-year transportation plan, later this year.) Unsurprisingly, given the less-than-stellar siloed approach to planning, UFL members prioritized planning streets for people and goods as a key topic in the Goods Movement 2030 project.

Recommended Citation:
“The Freight Space Race: Planning Streets for More Efficient & Sustainable Movement of People & Goods” Goods Movement 2030 (blog). Urban Freight Lab, April 4, 2023. https://www.goodsmovement2030.com/post/freight-space-race.
Technical Report

Developing a GPS-Based Truck Freight Performance Measure Platform

 
Download PDF  (4.70 MB)
URL: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/18003
Publication: TransNow, Transportation Northwest, U.S. Department of Transportation, University Transportation Centers Program.
Publication Date: 2010
Summary:

Although trucks move the largest volume and value of goods in urban areas, relatively little is known about their travel patterns and how the roadway network performs for trucks. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), Transportation Northwest (TransNow) at the University of Washington, and the Washington Trucking Associations have partnered on a research effort to collect and analyze global positioning system (GPS) truck data from commercial, in-vehicle, truck fleet management systems used in the central Puget Sound region. The research project is collecting commercially available GPS data and evaluating their feasibility to support a state truck freight network performance monitoring program.

WSDOT is interested in using this program to monitor truck travel times and system reliability and to guide freight investment decisions. The researchers reviewed truck freight performance measures that could be extracted from the data and that focused on travel times and speeds, which, analyzed over time, determine a roadway system’s reliability. The utility of spot speeds and the GPS data, in general, was evaluated in a case study of a three-week construction project on the Interstate-90 bridge. The researchers also explored methods for capturing regional truck travel performance.

Although trucks move the largest volume and value of goods in urban areas, relatively little is known about their travel patterns and how the roadway network performs for trucks. Global positioning systems (GPS) used by trucking companies to manage their equipment and staff and meet shippers’ needs capture truck data that are now available to the public sector for analysis. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), Transportation Northwest
(TransNow) at the University of Washington (UW), and the Washington Trucking Associations (WTA) have partnered on a research effort to collect and analyze GPS truck data from commercial, in-vehicle, truck fleet management systems used in the central Puget Sound region. The research project is collecting commercially available GPS data and evaluating their feasibility to support a state truck freight network performance monitoring program. WSDOT is interested in using this program to monitor truck travel times and system reliability and to guide freight investment decisions.

  • The success of the truck freight performance measurement program will depend on developing the capability to
    efficiently collect and process GPS devices’ output
    extract useful truck travel time and speed, roadway location, and stop location information and
    protect the identity of the truckers and their travel information so that business-sensitive information is not released.

While earlier studies have evaluated commercial vehicles’ travel characteristics by using GPS devices, these researchers did not have access to commercial fleet data and had to estimate corridor travel speeds from a limited number of portable GPS units capable of making frequent (1-to-60-second) location reads (Quiroga and Bullock 1998, Greaves and Figliozzi 2008, Due and Aultman-Hall 2007). This read frequency permitted a fine-grained analysis of truck movements on specific segments of the road network but did not provide enough data points to reliably track regional or corridor network performance.

This research project is taking a different approach. The data analyzed in this project are drawn from GPS devices installed to meet the trucking sector’s fleet management needs. So the truck locations are collected less frequently (typically every 5 to 15 minutes) but are gathered from a much larger number of trucks over a long period of time. The researchers are collecting data from 2,000 to 3,000 trucks per day for one year in the central Puget Sound region.

This report discusses the steps taken to build, clean, and test the data collection and analytic foundation from which the UW and WSDOT will extract network-based truck performance statistics. One of the most important steps of the project has been to obtain fleet management GPS data from the trucking industry. Trucking companies approached by WSDOT and the UW at the beginning of the study readily agreed to share their GPS data, but a lack of technical support from the
firms made data collection difficult. The researchers overcame that obstacle by successfully negotiating contracts with GPS and telecom vendors to obtain GPS truck reads in the study region. The next challenge was to gather and format the large quantities of data (millions of points) from different vendors’ systems so that they could be manipulated and evaluated by the project team. Handling the large quantity of data meant that data processing steps had to be automated,
which required the development and validation of rule-based logic that could be used to develop algorithms.

Because a truck performance measures program will ultimately monitor travel generated by trucks as they respond to shippers’ business needs, picking up goods at origins (O) and dropping them off at destinations (D), the team developed algorithms to extract individual truck’s O/D information from the GPS data. The researchers mapped (geocoded) each truck’s location (as expressed by a GPS latitude and longitude) to its actual location on the Puget Sound region’s roadway
network and to traffic analysis zones (TAZs) used for transportation modeling and planning.

The researchers reviewed truck freight performance measures that could be extracted from the data and that focused on travel times and speeds, which, analyzed over time, determine a roadway system’s reliability. Because the fleet management GPS data from individual trucks typically consist of infrequent location reads, making any one truck an unreliable probe vehicle, the researchers explored whether data from a larger quantity of trucks could compensate for infrequent location reads. To do this, the project had to evaluate whether the spot (instantaneous) speeds recorded by one truck’s GPS device could be used in combination with spot speeds from other trucks on the same portion of the roadway network.

The utility of spot speeds and the GPS data in general was evaluated in a case study of a three-week construction project on the Interstate-90 (I-90) bridge. The accuracy of the spot speeds was then validated by comparing the results with speed data from WSDOT’s freeway management loop system (FLOW).

The researchers also explored methods for capturing regional truck travel performance. The approach identified zones that were important in terms of the number of truck trips that were generated. Trucks’ travel performance as they traveled between these economic zones could then be monitored over time and across different times of day.

Authors: Dr. Ed McCormack, Xiaolei Ma, Charles Klocow, Anthony Curreri, Duane Wright
Recommended Citation:
McCormack, Edward D., Xiaolei Ma, Charles Klocow, Anthony Curreri and Duane Wright. “Developing a GPS-Based Truck Freight Performance Measure Platform.” (2010).
Technical Report

Development of a Freight Benefit/Cost Methodology for Project Planning

 
Download PDF  (1.32 MB)
URL: https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/research/reports/fullreports/815.1.pdf
Publication: Washington State Department of Transportation, Pacific NW Transportation Consortium (PacTrans)
Publication Date: 2013
Summary:
Future reauthorizations of the federal transportation bill will require a comprehensive and quantitative analysis of the freight benefits of proposed freight system projects. To prioritize public investments in freight systems and to ensure consideration of the contribution of freight to the overall system performance, states and regions need an improved method to analyze freight benefits associated with proposed highway and truck intermodal improvements that would lead to enhanced trade and sustainable economic growth, improved safety and environmental quality, and goods delivery in Washington State.
This project develops a process to address this need by building on previous and ongoing research by some project team members to develop an agency-friendly, data-supported framework to prioritize public investments for freight systems in Washington and Oregon. The project integrates two ongoing WSDOT-funded efforts: one to create methods to calculate the value of truck and truck-intermodal infrastructure projects and the other to collect truck probe data from commercial GPS devices to create a statewide Freight Performance Measures (FPM) program. This integration informs the development of a framework that allows public agencies to quantify freight investment benefits in specific areas such as major freight corridors and across borders.

 

 

Authors: Dr. Anne GoodchildDr. Ed McCormack, Ken Casavant, Zun Wang, B Starr McMullen, Daniel Holder
Recommended Citation:
Casavant, Ken, Anne Goodchild, Ed McCormack, Zun Wang, B. Starr McMullen, and Daniel Holder. "Development of a Freight Benefit/Cost Methodology for Project Planning." 
Technical Report

Developing a System for Computing and Reporting MAP-21 and Other Freight Performance Measures

 
Download PDF  (2.13 MB)
URL: https://www.wsdot.wa.gov/research/reports/fullreports/844.1.pdf
Publication: Washington State Transportation Center (TRAC)
Publication Date: 2015
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.

The report also documents the initial set of performance measures that can be produced with the NPMRDS and the specific steps required to do so. A subset of those metrics was tested using NPMRDS data, including delay and frequency of congestion, to illustrate how WSDOT could use the freight performance measures. Finally, recommendations and the next steps that WSDOT needs to take are discussed.

This report describes the outcome of the initial exploration of the National Performance Research Monitoring Data Set (NPMRDS), supplied by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to state transportation agencies and metropolitan planning organizations for use in computing roadway performance measures.

The NPMRDS provides roadway performance data for the national highway system (NHS). The intent of the NPMRDS was to provide a travel time estimate for every 5-minute time interval (epoch) of the year for all roadway segments in the NHS. The NPMRDS data are derived from instantaneous vehicle probe speed data supplied by a variety of GPS devices carried by both trucks and cars. The data are supplied on a geographic information system (GIS) roadway network, which divides the NHS into directional road segments based on the Traffic Message Channel (TMC) standard.

The report describes the availability, attributes, quality, and limitations of the NPMRDS data on the Interstates in the state of Washington.

Based on the review of the NPMRDS data, this report recommends a set of performance metrics for WSDOT’s use that describe the travel conditions that trucks moving freight within the state experience. It describes specific steps for computing those measures. And it uses a subset of those measures produced with the NPMRDS to illustrate how WSDOT can use those measures in its reporting and decision-making procedures.

Authors: Dr. Ed McCormackSaravanya (Sara) Sankarakumaraswamy, Mark E. Hallenbeck
Recommended Citation:
Hallenbeck, Mark E., Ed McCormack, and Saravanya Sankarakumaraswamy. Developing a system for computing and reporting MAP-21 and other freight performance measures. No. WA-RD 844.1. Washington (State). Dept. of Transportation. Research Office, 2015.