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Vehicle classification information is crucial input to transportation facility design, operations, and planning. As freight transportation is becoming more and more critical to regional and national economies, freight modeling is now an imperative issue for many transportation management agencies, for which truck classes and volumes are key input.
Over the last several decades population and economic growth in urban areas has intensified the need for more efficient transportation, including the expansion of existing transportation networks, or the construction of new transit projects. In either case, these infrastructure investments require careful prioritization and selection among available alternatives, and are subject to budgetary and other resource constraints.
Traditional paper and phone travel surveys are expensive, time consuming, and have problems of missing trips, illogical trip sequences, and imprecise travel time. GPS-based travel surveys can avoid many of these problems and are becoming increasingly popular in major cities worldwide. However, there is GPS signal loss or degradation in high-density cities such as NYC where urban canyon effects are significant, underground subway and commuter rail travels are extensive, GPS cold/warm start problems are obvious, and mixed land use is common.
Functional obsolescence and structural deficiencies of highway bridges are posing significant threats to commuters and transportation agencies throughout the United States. Recently, New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) classified approximately one quarter of its bridges as functionally obsolete and one-eighth as structurally deficient. Highway bridges located in urban areas are especially at high risk of functional obsolescence as the aging highway systems in these areas face significant increases in traffic volumes.
Transit investments can affect the clustering of economic activity within a region due to the changes in accessibility that transit can provide, either by increasing firm-based access to the central business district or increasing effective labor market size. This clustering can lead to what are known as agglomeration benefits that increase overall economic productivity and are external to the decisions taken by individual firms. Cost-benefit analysis of transit investments rarely account for such external benefits.
Annual average daily traffic (AADT) values play an important role in transportation design, operation, and planning. Each year, transportation agencies spend a significant amount of resources collecting this information. However, AADT values are mostly rough estimates based on the closest short-period traffic counts, factored up using adjustment factors derived from permanent continuous count stations.
Efforts to manage truck flows in congested urban areas have important implications not only for congestion relief, but also for air quality improvement and reductions in energy use. A vital input to these flow management efforts is knowledge of the origin-destination (O-D) movement patterns for various classes of trucks, and this presents a substantial challenge.
The objective of this research is to investigate the effects of road pricing plan, land-use policy and investments on transportation infrastructure on urbanized region and to help select the appropriate policies that foster socially and economically sustainable urban development. Most current road pricing research and practice have focused on the function of road pricing to manage congestion and to raise revenue. However, little is known about the effects of road pricing and land-use policies on the sustainability of an area over time.
