Improving the Reliability of Freight Travel

By Jones C., Sedor J., 2006.

This purpose of this article is to explain the progress that the FHWA has made in monitoring freight transportation’s performance on the nation’s highway system. In 2002, the nation’s freight carriers moved more than 19 billion tons of products worth about $13 trillion. Trucks carried about 60 percent of the tonnage and nearly 70 percent of the value. Research shows that a carrier charges about $25-$200 per hour for travel time, depending on the product being moved. Unexpected delays can increase this cost by 50 to 250 percent. Recently the FHWA launched the Freight Performance Measurement Initiative to monitor and measure the performance of the nation’s freight system. There have long been struggles with measuring freight performance, mainly due to the following reasons:

  • Diverse and contradictory objectives, such as the social, economic, mobility, and environmental objectives expressed by transportation decisionmakers and those noted by transportation system users and the community
  • Intangible products and services, such as providing an efficient and seamless transportation system or increasing the accessibility and mobility of people and freight
  • Unreliable measurement tools, such as speed sensors or wire loops buried in the pavement, which may not be available in all areas or may be broken or inoperable
  • Lack of resources and data, such as staff, expertise, and funding to collect new data and successfully apply available data

One potential way to get information is to use automatic vehicle location (AVL) technology installed in commercial vehicles. The best advantage of using AVL is that it allows data collection in real-time, instead of after-the-fact methods such as surveys or models.

According to Lance Newmann, president of Cambridge Systematics Inc., and chairman of the Transportation Research Board’s Performance Measurement Committee, there are two major reasons why identifying performance measures is difficult. First, the measures need to be in areas where the public sector can influence them, and second, they have to be meaningful to the freight stakeholders in the private sector.

The FHWA found average speed and buffer time index to be among the best performance measures for highways. They obtained permission from motor carriers to use their AVL data to track performance. The motor carriers were highly concerned with confidentiality, so they made sure to randomly assign trucks numbers so nobody would know which truck was from which company. The FHWA analyzed five interstate highways using the data and results are given in the report.