Transportation planners are becoming increasingly interested in freight movements. This interest, however, highlights the inadequacy of existing data on freight movements, especially in urban areas. Ogden [1992], for example, in his recent book on urban goods movement, has noted that most urban areas in the U.S., Canada, Britain and Australia have not collected comprehensive data on freight movements since the 1970's. The more recent data are mostly fragments -- small sets of partial data on movements in specific areas, across particular bridges or highway sections, etc.

Against this backdrop, the project reported here has been undertaken to create and test methods for synthesizing truck flow patterns from partial and fragmentary observations. To accomplish this goal, the project has focused on assembling all available data on truck flows in a particular urban area (New York City), developing a useable database from these separate data sets, and using the database to support a modeling effort aimed at estimating both origindestination patterns and link flows.