GIS Routing and Analysis of Oversize and Overweight Truck Permit

Trucking companies can obtain permits from state agencies allowing them to haul oversize and overweight loads. Most permit systems assign a specific route to be followed that accounts for various network travel restrictions. The routes assigned in these permits can provide a wealth of information for different types of transportation analyses. Unfortunately, the permit data isn’t always generated by a system or stored in a manner that allows directly importing the data into a GIS platform for mapping purposes. This paper presents a methodology that was developed to process archived permit records in West Virginia so that they could be imported into GIS and plotted using the existing WVDOT linear reference system (LRS). Since most states manage their transportation network in GIS using LRS, this methodology should be widely applicable. The automated procedure was able to map 91.4% of the permits that contained route data for the month of July 2011.