Australian Institute of Traffic Planning and Management
Abstract
The importance of freight activity in urban areas has increased substantially and is predicted to continue to rise. However, freight data is difficult to secure, and even more difficult to use in policy, forecasting and analysis. This is a direct consequence of the focus of traditional transport modelling - and thus data collection - on private travel. Significantly less research and modelling effort has been directed towards urban freight transport, which is in many ways more complex. Modelling of urban freight movement improves our understanding of its key drivers, leading to the development of more responsive infrastructure, policy and pricing solutions. Even gaining a good picture of what is going on right now is not straightforward to achieve, and this task of ‘predicting the present’ meets a number of the more urgent needs for fright movement assessment. This paper outlines work undertaken on behalf of Queensland Transport to address this need. Its aim was to combine existing traffic counts, roadside interview data and truck trip tables for Metropolitan Brisbane, to provide Queensland Transport with a current freight matrix and some measure of the confidence that may be placed in the results. The process itself prioritised and weighted the various input data in terms of its currency, quality and level of detail, so that the resulting matrices reflected a balanced combination of new and old, and high and low quality inputs. This approach ensured that the greatest possible use was made of a limited amount of freight data, and proved capable of estimating more than a single matrix by handling freight vehicles of different types
