Incorporating Urban-Area Truck Freight Value into the Urban Mobility Report

Abstract

For more than 30 years, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute (TTI) has developed methodologies and appropriate performance measures for estimating congestion performance and communicating them to technical and nontechnical audiences. TTI's Urban Mobility Report (UMR) has historically focused on passenger car congestion (i.e., congestion caused by the average commuter). However, roadway traffic congestion certainly affects both commuters and goods movement. With the documented growth of freight shipments and value, particularly in trucking, researchers developed and applied a methodology to include in UMR the truck freight commodity value that is affected by congestion in urban areas. The methodology uses data from FHWA's Freight Analysis Framework (FAF) and Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS). Commodity values supplied by the FAF are integrated into truck vehicle miles of travel calculated from the HPMS roadway inventory. Researchers estimated that $7 trillion worth of commodities were trucked on America's urban streets and highways during 2010. At the urban-area level, the results of the truck value measure appear to be intuitive, as bigger cities consume more goods and the greater consumption means a higher value of freight movement. The addition of a truck value to the UMR provides another dimension to inform policy makers and decision makers about the congestion problem. This addition also serves to inform trucking stakeholders with an estimate of the amount of truck value that is affected by congestion. Researchers will continue to include the truck freight value performance measure in subsequent releases of the UMR.

Approximation Framework of Embodied Energy of Safety: Insights and Analysis

“…Besides the vehicle-level analysis, another perspective is to study the wasted fuel at a traffic-flow level due to the congestion induced by the motor vehicle crashes, such as lane closures and the rubbernecking effect [16]. The "Urban Mobility Report" [17] uses traffic volume, speed, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s Multi-scale mOtor Vehicle and equipment Emission System (MOVES) model [18] to estimate the CO 2 emission and fuel consumption during congested conditions. Besides MOVES, other energy models that use second-by-second vehicle trajectory data (i.e., speed and acceleration) have been adopted, such as VT-Micro [19] and Future Automotive Systems Technology Simulator (FASTSim) [20].…”

“…A few studies have investigated traffic flow-level congestion impacts in the United States, where 5.5 billion hours are wasted annually because of both regular traffic congestion and induced congestion, translating to about USD 121 billion in 2012 [21]. In 2015, U.S. national congestion accounted for an additional 6.9 billion hours of driving and the equivalent of 3.1 billion gallons of fuel [17].…”

“…Apart from these national-level impacts of induced congestion from crashes, the research teams' literature review did not uncover any direct linkage between per crash occurrence and resulting energy impacts, as is common for economic analyses. Using the national-level estimation of the energy consequences of induced congestion of 3.1 billion gallons of gasoline [17], and assuming 6.3 million crashes per year that cover fatal, injury, and property damage only (PDO) [5], the average per crash energy impact is estimated at 492 gallons of fuel per crash. Our framework indicates a much larger impact when all factors are taken into account.…”