TRUCK TRIP GENERATION BY GROCERY STORES

Information about truck movements on our transportation system is important for understanding and supporting freight mobility. Unfortunately, there is relatively little information available on how different land uses generate truck trips. Such information is necessary as input into travel forecasting models as well as needed to plan for a range of freight-oriented infrastructure construction projects. The project would use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools to explore innovative means of linking a diverse set of transportation, land use, economic, and business location databases to develop a non survey-based truck trip generation tool. Truck transportation is a derived demand so each truck trip is filling an economic need by linking a resource extraction site, a crop, a manufacturer, a supplier, or an intermodal terminal with a consignee. By using GIS tools, this relationship between a land use that generates trucks trips and truck volumes on roadways could be explored. Such tools that estimate and forecast the relationship between land use and trip generation exist in the passenger planning world but have not been widely applied to freight. The Puget Sound region, as well as Washington State as a whole, has a number of diverse databases that potentially could be used. This includes commercial and residential land use at a parcel level, employment data, restaurant locations from health department records, agricultural and forest products land use, on-line telephone directories, and truck licensing information from the Department of Licensing. This information could be used in conjunction with roadway-based truck volume data available from a variety of agencies to derive trip generation information. This proposed project would borrow from trip generation methodologies used in the passenger planning world.