Investigation of Truck Traffic versus Placement of Inspection Facilities for Enforcement of Overweight Trucks in California

摘要

The volume of commercial truck traffic, as well as the associated volume ofoverweight trucks (i.e., trucks that violate road weight regulations), is growing everyyear, imposing a great challenge to roadway maintenance as well as truck weightenforcement. To support the effective deployment of enforcement facilities inCalifornia, California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) are developingstrategies to identify where the future vehicle inspection facilities should be located soas to maximize their effectiveness in enforcement. To address this need, a project wasinitiated to develop a deployment strategy by identifying areas that are most in needof future facilities as well as where to locate future facilities in the identified areas soas to minimize alternative routes overweight trucks could use to bypass the facilities.This paper describes the efforts undertaken to identify areas that have high trucktraffic volumes but are lack of effective enforcement. The truck traffic data areanalyzed to identify areas with high truck traffic volumes while locations of theexisting facilities are compared against routes with heavy truck traffic to evaluate theeffectiveness of the enforcement coverage. Candidate areas are identified byexamining the truck traffic and the facilities along each corridor, and atwo-dimensional evaluation method using Google Earth is devised to provide acomprehensive evaluation. The identified areas will facilitate Caltrans to determinewhich areas are most problematic and should be equipped with future facilities. Theapproach described in this paper may also serve as an example for evaluating theenforcement coverage and identifying high risk areas in other states.