Design and Development of a Methodology to Estimate Urban Container Truck Traffic

This paper describes a methodology to estimate container truck traffic volume to help understand the effects of this traffic on transportation engineering and planning issues in urban inland ports within the Canadian Prairie Region. The methodology is sensitive to the unique characteristics of container truck traffic and is intended to assist transportation engineers and planners reveal issues that should be considered in defining, evaluating, and choosing among alternative options to improve urban container freight transportation. Despite the growth and importance of containers, transportation engineers and planners currently have insufficient tools to estimate container truck traffic volumes in their cities. Consequently they struggle to quantitatively evaluate the effect container truck traffic imposes on the urban transportation system. Regardless, there is an increasing demand for freight forecasts for long-term infrastructure planning; however, forecasts are weakened unless there is data representing current conditions. Therefore, methodologies are required to accurately estimate current container truck traffic volume. The methodology discussed in this paper is based on research currently being conducted to develop a container truck model in Winnipeg using 348 hours of truck classification counts at various locations on the truck network. From this preliminary analysis three important findings are revealed: (1) container truck traffic exhibits different temporal characteristics than other articulated truck traffic; (2) geographic distribution of container truck traffic differs from other articulated truck traffic; and (3) there is a significant difference between the container truck and other articulated truck axle configurations.