1 ESTIMATING TRUCK FLOWS ON A FREEWAY NETWORK TO IMPROVE FREIGHT OPERATIONS AND PLANNING

Increased knowledge of truck travel patterns has the potential to increase overall highway safety, lead to better-managed maintenance operations, provide cost savings to public agencies, validate investments in intelligent transportation systems, and improve long-range planning and forecasting. This paper explores techniques that use current ITS technologies such as video image processing and loop detector data algorithms to collect and verify short and long vehicle count and length data. Three sets of traffic data for each time interval were created, and then compared using statistical analyses to produce results that that reveal some new information about the freight transportation system in the Portland metropolitan region