Texas faces increased freight demands from population growth and economic success, with little prospect of adding substantial capacity to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) principal highway networks. In Texas's truck-dominated intrastate corridors, can railroads offer competitive service and reduce truck volumes. Current mode choice models do not capture the effects of weight, speed, engine power, grade, or curvature--key elements of any mechanistic approach. Moreover, they are incapable of fully internalizing external or social costs into their calculations. Therefore, in two critical areas for transportation planners--fuel costs and emissions existing models are deficient. This project combines mechanistic models for both trucks and rail into a PC model, calibrated for Texas and implemented through a series of study workshops for TxDOT and metropolitan planning organization (MPO) planning staff. The output of the toolkit allows planners to compare truck and rail service over a series of corridors in terms of overall cost, fuel costs, emissions per ton-mile, and related secondary costs such as pick-up and delivery costs for rail freight. It provides truck and rail operating cost comparisons that should strengthen corridor analysisan important component of the MAP-21 legislation.


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    Title :

    Evaluating Truck and Rail Movements along Competitive Multimodal Corridors


    Contributors:
    C Bhat (author) / D Seedah (author) / R Harrison (author) / T Owens (author)

    Publication date :

    2014


    Size :

    113 pages


    Type of media :

    Report


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English