Development of an overweight vehicle permit fee structure for Illinois

Abstract

Permits are one of the most effective and common tools for state agencies to regulate the operation of overweight and oversize vehicles by ensuring the safety of passenger and freight traffic and minimizing damage to pavements and bridges while promoting commerce and the safe movement of goods and services. Although the State of Illinois uses a relatively comprehensive permit system, many of its parts have not been revised for more than 30 years. Therefore, the objective of this study was to revise the current permit system by evaluating up-to-date impacts of overweight vehicles. In this study, impacts of overweight (OW) vehicles were evaluated in three aspects (bridge, pavement, and traffic safety) and individual fees were developed for each. The most recent databases on infrastructure condition and state-of-the-art prediction/classification algorithms were employed to produce the realistic and up-to-date assessment of OW vehicles' impact. Finally, a combined permit fee was recommended as a function of miles to be traveled, as well as axle and weight information, by aggregating the calculated individual fees. 17.

Analysis of Overweight Truck Permit Policy in New Jersey

“…Previous studies recognized the impact of OW vehicles on infrastructure and attempt to estimate the unit damage by means of pavement and bridge performance models. The researchers focused on distribution of the vehicle weight over its axles in these studies, as pavement and bridge wear cannot be simply attributed to the weight of a vehicle (OW or otherwise) (3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11).…”

“…Al-Qadi et al (10) and Gungor et al (11) developed data-driven performance prediction models for pavement and bridges to compute OW permit fee instead of using structural simulation software. They also quantified the impact of OW trucks on highway safety and took this into account for computing the permit fee.…”

“…The existing models quantified the cost of infrastructure damage caused by OW trucks and some studies even proposed alternative permit fee schemes (10,11).…”