Freight Mobility

TTI has developed and implemented performance measures for freight mobility and reliability. The documentation below describe the methods and measures used to quantify truck delay, wasted diesel fuel, and associated costs, as well as urban area freight monetary values and freight reliability.

Metropolitan Freight Transportation

Tools to Facilitate Implementation of Effective Metropolitan Freight Transportation Strategies

Publication: Transportation Research Board’s National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Research Report 897
Authors: Bill Eisele, Mario Monsreal, Shuang Guo, Seckin Ozkul, Behzad Karimi Varzardoliya, Kristine Williams, Fatemeh Ranaiefar, Michael Kao, and Susan Atherton
Published: 2018

Provides transportation practitioners and decision makers with guidance for implementing effective metropolitan freight transportation strategies. The report outlines thirty strategies that are tailored to the specific circumstances that are found in local areas. It also identifies and describes sixteen factors that impact implementation.

Measures for Canada

Evaluating Global Freight Corridor Performance for Canada

Publication: Journal of Transportation of the Institute of Transportation Engineers
Authors: William L. Eisele, Louis-Paul Tardif, Juan C. Villa, David L. Schrank, and Tim Lomax
Published: March 2011

Paper published in the inaugural ITE Journal of Transportation (page 39) describing the development and application of truck mobility and reliability indicators for measuring freight system performance for Canada. Includes methods to weight the measures by twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) for supply chain analyses.

Truck Drivers’ Routing Decisions

Evaluating the Impact of Real-Time Mobility and Travel Time Reliability Information on Truck Drivers’ Routing Decisions

Publication: Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
Authors: Xiaoqiang Kong, William L. Eisele, Yunlong Zhang, and Daren B. H. Cline
Published: September 2018

This research analyzed 14,538 global positioning system devices recording trips on the I-495 crossing through Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC, and 2,166 trips in the Dallas area, to explore how truck drivers make routing decisions based on real-time travel time and reliability information by applying a binary logistic regression model.

Truck Travel Times

Using Intelligent Transportation Systems Travel-Time Data for Multimodal Analyses and System Monitoring

Publication: Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
Authors: William L. Eisele, Laurence R. Rilett, Kendra Brown Mhoon, Clifford Spiegelman
Published: January 2001

Paper describing the differences in travel time between trucks and toll-tag equipped vehicles along a 2-mile segment of US 290 in Houston, Texas. Table 3 summarizes the results and indicates that across congestion levels trucks were an average of 6 percent slower than toll-tag equipped vehicles.