Commercial Vehicle Behaviour: Analysing GPS Records

The state-of-practice in commercial vehicle modelling is based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and aggregate economic sectors. There is a lack of understanding of the explicit activity chain characteristics of commercial vehicles. The aim of this research is to contribute to the body of knowledge on commercial vehicle activity chain characteristics by distinguishing, both temporally and spatially, between intra- and inter-provincial activity chains. Activity chains are extracted from the GPS logs of 41 711 commercial vehicles and analysed for different days of the week. The land-locked province of Gauteng, South Africa, is used as the study area since it contributes about 35% to the country's GDP. It can be considered the centre point for all major freight movements, imports, exports, and local distributions. Inter-provincial vehicles have not been considered in past research and are now the focus point in this paper. Inter-provincial vehicles are analysed as to where they enter and exit the study area and the number of activities they perform inside the area. Past research referred to inter-provincial traffic as through-traffic, but the contribution in this paper shows that the majority of inter-provincial chains enter and exit the study area through the same gateway, countering the idea of travelling through.