How Urban Commercial Vehicle Trips Are Chained: Case Studies in Texas and Idaho

Freight transportation is an important part of in the urban transportation system and contributes to traffic congestion, pollution, infrastructure damage, etc. Previously the authors studied the commercial vehicle trip-chaining and tour-chaining patterns in five Texas metropolitan regions (‎1). In this paper, the authors furthered our previous empirical study by adding one more study area in Idaho to the case study set. Two tour choice models were fitted, one for each region, with the commercial vehicle survey data obtained for Texas and Idaho. Model results showed that commercial vehicle trip-chaining strategies are associated with cargo type, travel purpose, travel time, dwell time and tour destination. Furthermore, there is large cross-regional variation in urban commercial vehicle movements between Texas and Idaho. That confirms that region specific freight data collection and modeling efforts are needed. Further investigation is in need to incorporate urban structure, land use and economic activities into the modeling effort pending on data availability.