Comprehensive Freight Demand Data Collection Framework for Large Urban Areas - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 89

(NCHRP) 2007 ) in the United States. From this point on it was required for state
and metropolitan planning organizations to include freight activities in their
transportation planning processes. These pieces of legislation motivated a trend
towards a more systematic and quantitative consideration of freight issues by
transportation professionals. The creation of the National Cooperative Freight
Research Program, the first program exclusively dedicated to support freight
transportation research, is probably the most recent and notable example of this
trend.
However, characterizing the freight system—a requirement for the develop-
ment of policies and programs to improve its performance—has proven to be a
difficult task as it is hard to think of any other component of the transportation
system that is more varied, exhibits so many fundamentally different behaviors,
has more interacting agents, and is so pervasive in modern life than freight. The
multifaceted and heterogeneous nature, compounded with the lack of freight data
has presented a challenge to both researchers and practitioners. The latter affects
all steps of transportation modeling (generation, distribution, modal split, and
traffic assignment) which are critical for: (1) developing improvement strategies
for freight mobility; (2) system performance forecasting; (3) mitigating the
impacts of truck traffic; (4) determining the impacts on air quality; and
(5) improving traffic safety and network performance. Thus, it is important to
develop efficient data collection procedures that can help collect the data at
minimal cost and effort.
The objective of this chapter is to develop a comprehensive freight demand data
collection framework for mid-size and large urban areas. The chapter briefly
discusses the characteristics and dimensions of the freight demand. Building on
this discussion, it describes the data needs for different modeling techniques, and
potential data sources. The following section outlines data collection procedures,
ranging from surveys to freight volume counts. Finally, the last two sections
highlight data expectations and challenges, develop and describe the data collec-
tion framework, and discuss the costs associated with the different strategies.
2 The Freight System
The freight system is comprised of a set of interacting, interrelated economic
agents, facilities and infrastructure that form a complex system that is in charge of
producing, processing, transporting, distributing the supplies needed for manu-
facturing, human consumption, and trade. In general terms, there are a number of
agents and facilities of relevance to the study of freight systems including: ship-
pers, carriers, receivers and consumers, among others. The shippers are the agents
that produce and ship freight at the supply points (e.g., raw material production
sites, manufacturing, distribution or assembling companies, among others). They
send cargoes to their destinations, which are transported using their own assets, or
with the assets of other companies hired for that purpose. The companies that