Integrating Public and Private Data Sources for Freight Transportation Planning

The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21) stipulates that state transportation agencies expand their interest in freight initiatives and modeling to support planning efforts, particularly the evaluation of current and future freight transportation capacity necessary to ensure freight mobility. However, the understanding of freight demand and the evaluation of current and future freight transportation capacity are not only determined by robust models, but are critically contingent on the availability of accurate data. Effective partnerships are clearly needed between the public and private sectors to ensure adequate freight planning and funding of transportation infrastructure at the state and local levels. However, establishing partnerships with firms who are both busy and suspicious of data-sharing, remains a challenge. This study was commissioned by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to explore the feasibility of TxDOT entering into a data-sharing partnership with representatives of the private sector to obtain sample data for use in formulating a strategy for integrating public and private sector data sources. This report summarizes the findings, lessons learned, and recommendations formed from the outreach effort, and provides a prototype freight data architecture that will facilitate the storage, exchange, and integration of freight data through a data-sharing partnership.Texas Department of Transportation Research and Technology Implementation Office P.O. Box 5080 Austin, TX 78763-5080Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin

A New Approach for Allocating Highway Costs

The allocation of highway costs is constantly debated among legislatures, highway agencies, and highway users as it directly relates to concerns about equity in terms of cost responsibility and actual user charges. One of the major challenges in highway cost allocation stems from the need to estimate pavement damage by different vehicle classes. Normally, the calculation of damage caused by heavy vehicles to the highway infrastructure utilizes the concept of Equivalent Single Axle Load (ESAL). This concept was empirically established after the American Association of State Highway Officials America (AASHO) Road Test almost half a century ago. Although the ESAL concept is widely used in pavement design, it has a number of shortcomings when applied for the estimation of pavement damage by different vehicle classes. Some of these limitations include: failure to account for specific infrastructure and environmental conditions, disregard of the differences in traffic configurations and composition, and the inability to capture different distress types. This leads to a fairly inaccurate and generic estimation of pavement damage by vehicle class. This paper proposes an innovative and more rational highway cost allocation approach based on the recently completed guide for the "Mechanistic-Empirical Design Guide of New and Rehabilitated Pavement Structures" developed under the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project 1-37A. The Guide accounts for all factors that contribute to pavement deterioration, thereby addressing the shortcomings of an ESAL-based analysis listed earlier. Estimates for pavement damage attributable to each vehicle class can thus be accurately simulated. For the purposes of this study, traffic data collected at a weigh-in-motion station in Texas were used to estimate the highway cost shares of different vehicle classes, given different pavement structural capacities

A New Approach for Allocating Highway Costs

The allocation of highway costs is constantly debated among legislatures, highway agencies, and highway users as it directly relates to concerns about equity in terms of cost responsibility and actual user charges. One of the major challenges in highway cost allocation stems from the need to estimate pavement damage by different vehicle classes. Normally, the calculation of damage caused by heavy vehicles to the highway infrastructure utilizes the concept of Equivalent Single Axle Load (ESAL). This concept was empirically established after the American Association of State Highway Officials America (AASHO) Road Test almost half a century ago. Although the ESAL concept is widely used in pavement design, it has a number of shortcomings when applied for the estimation of pavement damage by different vehicle classes. Some of these limitations include: failure to account for specific infrastructure and environmental conditions, disregard of the differences in traffic configurations and composition, and the inability to capture different distress types. This leads to a fairly inaccurate and generic estimation of pavement damage by vehicle class. This paper proposes an innovative and more rational highway cost allocation approach based on the recently completed guide for the “Mechanistic-Empirical Design Guide of New and Rehabilitated Pavement Structures” developed under the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project 1-37A. The Guide accounts for all factors that contribute to pavement deterioration, thereby addressing the shortcomings of an ESAL-based analysis listed earlier. Estimates for pavement damage attributable to each vehicle class can thus be accurately simulated. For the purposes of this study, traffic data collected at a weigh-in-motion station in Texas were used to estimate the highway cost shares of different vehicle classes, given different pavement structural capacities

A Rational mechanistically-based approach for allocating highway costs

Paper presented at the 26th Annual Southern African Transport Conference 9 - 12 July 2007 "The challenges of implementing policy?", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa. ABSTRACT:The allocation of highway costs is constantly debated among legislatures, highway agencies, and highway users as it directly relates to concerns about equity in terms of cost responsibility and actual user charges. One of the major challenges in highway cost allocation stems from the need to estimate pavement damage by different vehicle classes. Normally, the calculation of damage caused by heavy vehicles to the highway infrastructure utilizes the concept of Equivalent Single Axle Load (ESAL) or E80. This concept was empirically established after the AASHO Road Test almost half a century ago. Although the E80 concept is widely used in pavement design, it has a number of shortcomings when applied for the estimation of pavement damage by different vehicle classes. Some of these limitations include: failure to account for specific infrastructure and environmental conditions, disregard of the differences in traffic configurations and composition, and the inability to capture different distress types. This leads to a fairly inaccurate and generic estimation of pavement damage by vehicle class. This paper proposes an innovative and more rational highway cost allocation approach based on the recently completed guide for the “Mechanistic-Empirical Design Guide of New and Rehabilitated Pavement Structures” developed under the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project 1-37A. The Guide accounts for all factors that contribute to pavement deterioration, thereby addressing the shortcomings of an ESAL-based analysis listed earlier. Estimates for pavement damage attributable to each vehicle class can thus be accurately simulated. For the purposes of this study, traffic data collected at a weigh-in-motion station in Texas were used to estimate the highway cost shares of different vehicle classes, given varying pavement structural capacity.This paper was transferred from the original CD ROM created for this conference. The material on the CD ROM was published using Adobe Acrobat technology. The original CD ROM was produced by Document Transformation Technologies Postal Address: PO Box 560 Irene 0062 South Africa. Tel.: +27 12 667 2074 Fax: +27 12 667 2766 E-mail: [email protected] URL: http://www.doctech.co.z

Highway damage due to movement of wind turbine components

Paper presented at the 31st Annual Southern African Transport Conference 9-12 July 2012 "Getting Southern Africa to Work", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.This paper proposes a methodology for assessing the damage imposed by the movement of wind turbine components on Texas’s highway infrastructure. The pavement damage associated with traffic resulting from site preparation was omitted from the scope of this study because reliable data characterizing the construction traffic were not available. The damage to the pavement structure was estimated using three primary distresses: rutting, longitudinal, and alligator cracking. In addition, the impact on the ride quality was also estimated. Pavement damage was evaluated using the Mechanistic Empirical Pavement Design Guide (MEPDG). The methodology adopted involved calculating the pavement distress due to the combined effect of the wind turbine and the design traffic relative to the design traffic only. This ensures that biases in the distress predictions obtained from the MEPDG will cancel each other out in each of the two scenarios. For the roughness estimate, the difference between the damage value due to the combined traffic and the design traffic only was evaluated and deemed as the damage indicator. The researchers observed that the increased pavement damage in the case of national highways was roughly 0.3 and 4 per cent irrespective of the distress mechanism. However, the pavement damage on state highways had a much more serious impact. The researchers observed that the relative damage imposed on the pavement structure from a roughness perspective was minimal. The additional damage imposed by the wind turbine truck traffic will translate into a reduction in pavement service life estimated at 9 per cent.This paper was transferred from the original CD ROM created for this conference. The material was published using Adobe Acrobat 10.1.0 Technology. The original CD ROM was produced by Document Transformation Technologies Postal Address: PO Box 560 Irene 0062 South Africa. Tel.: +27 12 667 2074 Fax: +27 12 667 2766 E-mail: nigel@doctech URL: http://www.doctech.co.zadm201

Research report (University of Texas at Austin. Center for Transportation Research)

"Texas energy sector has a critical impact-historically and currently-on both the state economy and the Texas transportation system. The stat's various transportation modes, including rail, highways, pipelines, and ports, form a system that supports the energy sector in a number of ways.