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Developing roadway performance measures using commercial gps data from trucks
Abstract
Increasingly, private sector trucks are equipped with global positioning system devices for business efficiency. Acquiring data from these devices provides public transportation organizations with an opportunity to quantify roadway performance. There are challenges due to privacy concerns and data processing requirements. Several organizations have addressed these challenges and have successful performance measurement programs.
... Today, the availability and precision of GPS (global positioning system) equipment allows highway layout elements to be easily measured by vehicles travelling at highway speed and leading to a reduction of time and resources during the data acquisition step [12]. Raw GPS data that represent highway axis are also available from volunteered geographic information, like OpenStreetMap, and from private companies [13]. ...
This paper describes the development of a systematic methodology for identifying and ranking bottlenecks using probe data collected by commercial global positioning system fleet management devices mounted on trucks. These data are processed in a geographic information system and assigned to a roadway network to provide performance measures for individual segments. The authors hypothesized that truck speed distributions on these segments can be represented by either a unimodal or bimodal probability density function and proposed a new reliability measure for evaluating roadway performance. Travel performance was classified into three categories: unreliable, reliably fast, and reliably slow. A mixture of two Gaussian distributions was identified as the best fit for the overall distribution of truck speed data. Roadway bottlenecks were ranked on the basis of both the reliability and congestion measurements. The method was used to evaluate the performance of Washington state roadway segments, and proved efficient at identifying and ranking truck bottlenecks. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)TE.1943-5436.0000444. (C) 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
This paper documents the development of data collection methodologies that can be used to measure truck movements along specific roadway corridors in Washington State cost-effectively. The intent of this study was to design and test methodologies that could provide information to ascertain the performance of freight mobility roadway improvement projects. The benchmarks created would be used to report on speed and volume improvements that resulted from completed roadway projects. One technology tested consisted of Commercial Vehicle Information System and Networks electronic truck transponders, which were mounted on the windshields of approximately 30,000 trucks traveling in Washington. These transponders were used at weigh stations across the state to improve the efficiency of truck regulatory compliance checks. With transponder reads from sites anywhere in the state being linked through software, the transponder-equipped trucks can become a travel time probe fleet. The second technology tested involved Global Positioning Systems (GPS) placed in volunteer trucks to collect specific truck movement data at 5-s intervals. GPS data made it possible to locate when and where monitored trucks experienced congestion. With this information aggregated over time, it was possible to generate performance statistics related to the reliability of truck trips and even to examine changes in route choice for trips between high-volume origin-destination pairs. The study found that both data collection technologies could be useful; however, the key to either technology is whether enough instrumented vehicles pass over the roadways for which data are required.