Developing Appropriate Freight Performance Measures for Emerging Users

Federal and state transportation planning and policy has begun to focus on highway performance measurement, balancing goals, performance measures and measurement. The push toward performance measurement first focused on passenger vehicles, largely ignoring the measurement of freight-related (truck) performance. The period since 2000 has seen a handful of departments of transportation (DOTs) examining broad indicators of efficient freight movement, but as of yet, there was no definitive work in the area until a 2003 Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) funded project began to look into various freight tracking technologies to develop freight performance measures (FPMs), finally selecting a Global Positioning System (GPS) technology widely adopted by U.S motor carriers. At the time of this study report, the FHWA study worked on data manipulation and graphical representation of highway speeds, but has yet to use the data for alternative performance measures or examine the possibility of using the truck respondents as probe vehicles for real-time intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications. The purpose of this report is to develop a set of universal FPMs, as well as looking into various applications, both real-time and long-term planning, for the truck GPS data collected as part of the FHWA study.