Estimating traffic impacts of an off-hour delivery program using a regional planning model.

摘要

In this study a methodology is developed to employ a regional planning model to study the effects of an off-hour delivery program on the transportation network of New York City. The off-hour delivery program under study would shift deliveries to food and retail-related businesses within the borough of Manhattan to the overnight hours, by offering businesses a tax deduction incentive. Behavioral data describing the percentage of receivers participating by tax incentive offered is obtained and translated to commercial vehicle trips. The New York Best Practice Model, a regional travel demand model, is used to measure the impacts of shifting commercial vehicle trips on the rest of the traffic network. The results show that increasing tax incentive amounts reduces the amount of congestion throughout the regional highway network, and thus the proposed program would beneficial to transportation network. Further sensitivity analysis finds that running the highway assignment portion of the model alone does not produce expected results when changes are made to the highway network, and furthermore that the model is very sensitive to changes and its results unpredictable. In order to fully validate the results other models should be used in parallel with the regional planning model.