Webinar: The Role of Commercial Establishment Surveys in Freight Behavior Research; and the Modeling of Freight Trip Generation, Freight Generation, and Service Trips

The Federal Highway Administration will host a webinar on conducting establishment-level surveys of freight movements and on the possible uses of the resulting data in transportation decision-making. This webinar is part of FHWA’s Freight Model Improvement Program (FMIP).

Webinar Details

When: Thursday, January 28, 2016, 1 – 2:30 pm EST

Registration: This event is open to all interested parties. Please register for the event by clicking the following link https://collaboration.fhwa.dot.gov/dot/fhwa/WC/Lists/Seminars/DispForm.aspx?ID=826

Background:

Understanding the movement of freight and its characteristics is essential to managing transportation networks and planning future infrastructure investments. There are numerous methods for collecting data on freight flows, ranging from traffic counts and travel time studies to comprehensive commodity flow and origin-destination surveys. This webinar will outline the role of establishment surveys in regional and statewide transportation planning, freight demand forecasting, and modeling. Presenters will discuss common methods and approaches to collecting the survey data, as well as typical challenges encountered when conducting the surveys.

In addition, this webinar will also describe the use of data obtained via establishment-level surveys to estimate disaggregate Freight Generation (FG), Freight Trip Generation (FTG), and Service Trip Generation (STG) models. The establishment-level nature of these models enable their use at any level of geography: establishment, city block, street, transportation analysis zone, ZIP code, county, etc. These models, in spite of their simplicity, have been found to produce better estimates than any other alternatives currently available.

Presenters:

José Holguin-Veras, Ph.D., P.E., is the William H. Hart Professor and Director of the Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment (CITE) and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations’ Center of Excellence on Sustainable Urban Freight Systems at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Dr. Holguin-Veras also led the research teams that produced NCFRP Report 19: Freight Trip Generation and Land Use and NCFRP Report 33: Improving Freight System Performance in Metropolitan Areas: A Planning Guide.

Vladimir Livshits, Ph.D., is the Transportation Model Program Manager for the Maricopa Association of Governments, the metropolitan planning organization for the Phoenix, AZ, metro region. Dr. Livshits is the Committee Research Coordinator for the TRB Standing Committee on Transportation Demand Forecasting and a co-chair of the Urban Big Data subcommittee of the TRB Standing Committee on Urban Transportation Data and Information Systems.

Catherine Lawson, Ph.D., is Department Chair and an Associate Professor at the State University of New York at Albany. Her research interests include advanced uses of archived intelligent transportation systems data and spatial analysis/geographic information systems applications for transportation planning and analysis for freight, transit, and passenger travel. Dr. Lawson is an active member of the Transportation Research Board and is currently serving in the Section on Data and Information Systems and the Public Transportation Group. She also was a member of the research team that produced NCFRP Report 19: Freight Trip Generation and Land Use.

For more information, please visit the official website here.