InfrastructureU.S. to expand freight congestion tracking initiative
The worst traffic bottleneck in the United States is the I-290 interchange with I-90 and I-94 in Chicago, where the average speed at 5 p.m. drops to 15 mph; the average peak hour speed is 23 mph, and the average non-peak hour speed is only 33 mph; data gathered from trucks identifies bottlenecks, and could help steer infrastructure planning
Speed and location data collected from approximately 650,000 trucks is being used to pinpoint congestion hotspots around the United States and could play a key role in infrastructure planning and funding. That data has been collected by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) since 2002 in partnership with the Federal Highway Administration (FHA).
The Journal of Commerce Online’s William B. Cassidy writes that new technology announced last Wednesday will make it easier for the trucking industry group and FHWA to provide federal, state, and local governments with congestion data needed to support spending decisions.
The Freight Performance Measures (FPM) initiative also links FHWA and ATRI with truck operators of all types throughout the nation, said Daniel Murray, vice president of research at ATRI, the research arm of the American Trucking Associations.
The truck information comes from communications and tracking systems installed by motor carriers to monitor their own fleets and communicate with drivers. “We have data sharing agreements (with fleets) that include nondisclosure clauses,” said Murray.
Near real-time information on congestion collected by the system will soon be available to government, motor carriers and shippers on the Web, FHWA and ATRI said, through a software tool called FPMWeb.
FPMWeb will be “free and available to the general public” within a year, said Daniel Murray, vice president of research at ATRI. The tool measures operating speeds for trucks at any given place and point in time along 25 interstate highways.
ATRI today released its 2009 Bottleneck Analysis, which uses FPM data to rank 100 U.S. highway bottlenecks by congestion intensity. The report also analyzes the level at which truck-based freight was affected by traffic congestion in 2009.
The worst bottleneck in the United States is the I-290 interchange with I-90 and I-94 in Chicago, where the average speed at 5 p.m. drops to 15 mph. The average peak hour speed is 23 mph, and the average non-peak hour speed is only 33 mph.
“The long-term benefit (of FPM) is getting transportation investment to focus on these bottlenecks,” said Murray. “As an industry, we’ve complained for years that highways don’t get their fair share (of funding).” The FPM data can help change that, he said.
