This project developed a new methodology to estimate congestion impacts on freight movement, reliability, delays, costs, and emissions. Results suggest that traditional sensors underestimate the impacts of congestion on travel-times and variability. It shows that congestion is not only more costly but also causes large increases in pollutants.
This methodology allows planners to incorporate freight performance measures. In the Portland metropolitan region the focus was on developing multi-criteria tools for measuring and analyzing the impacts of freight corridor congestion. On segments along more than 300 miles of Interstate 5 (I-5) the focus was on using multiple data sources Ð commercial truck GPS, Oregon DOT corridor travel-time loops and incident data - to analyze the impacts of congestion.
Freight corridor sections can have different reliability characteristics. A programming logic was developed to identify corridors and estimate localized impacts of travel-time unreliability.