Analyzing Commercial Through-Traffic

Abstract The impact that commercial vehicles, especially freight, has on traffic is disproportionately large compared to the number of vehicles they represent. Instead of treating commercial vehicles and commercial through-traffic as back- ground noise in our transport planning models, this paper aims to shed light on the characteristics of commercial through-traffic. We argue that if we better understand the activities and activity chains, we would be in a position to build better and more realistic models that, in turn, will assist in better decision-making. In this paper we analyzed the activity chains of through-traffic, drawing from a pool of more than 30000 commercial vehicles that were tracked for six months. The results of the analysis show on an hour-by-hour basis where vehicles enter the study area, the number of activities conducted within the area, and the point of departure. In the porously bounded economic hub of South Africa, the province of Gauteng, we show that the majority of vehicles come into and leave the province through the same arterial routes. We also find distinguishing characteristics between through-traffic originating from within, versus those that originate from outside the province. It is a novel contribution that investigates the activity chain characteristics in a disaggregated manner, and lays a new foundation to build better transportation models in which freight traffic is reflected more accurately in an urban environment. Understanding the disaggregate activity chain structures allows us to generate synthetic populations of commercial vehicles and model them in an agent-based setting, such as the Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) toolkit.