Measuring and Documenting Truck Activity Times at International Border Crossings

Documenting the times trucks incur when crossing an international border facility is valuable both to the private freight industry and to gateway facility operators and planners. Members of the project team previously developed and implemented an approach to document truck activity times associated with an international border crossing by using technologies that are already in use by truck fleets. The approach relies on position, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems in the form of on-board global positioning system (GPS)-enabled data units, virtual perimeters called geo-fences that surround areas of interest, and a mechanism for data transmission. The investigators teamed with a major North American freight hauler whose trucks regularly traverse two of the busiest North American freight border crossings – the privately owned Ambassador Bridge, connecting Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, and the publicly owned Blue Water Bridge, connecting Port Huron, MI, and Sarnia, ON – to determine times associated with the multiple activities associated with using the facilities at these border crossing sites. Data were collected from the fleet over several months and processed to produce distributions of overall crossing times, queuing times, and inspection times for U.S.-bound and Canada-bound trucks. Parallel to these efforts, Transport Canada (TC) and the Ontario Ministry of Transportation were using a Bluetooth-based approach to collect truck data at these major border crossing facilities. In this study, the geo-fence approach and the data collection and processing efforts are described. Changes in roadway infrastructure at the border crossing facilities that could affect results obtained with presently implemented geo-fences are also summarized. Empirical comparisons are conducted between truck volumes and crossing times in the geo-fence and Transport Canada datasets. In addition, interest in the type of results produced from the geo-fence approach expressed by individuals associated with border crossing times is summarized.