Identifying and Excessive Vehicle Idling and Opportunities for Off-Road Fuel Tax Credits for Stationary Operations in the Caltrans Fleet. Phase I

摘要

BSTRACT This report documents the research project Identifying Excessive Vehicle Idling and Opportunities for Off-Road Fuel Tax Credits for Stationary Operations in the Caltrans Fleet Phase 1, performed in response to a California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) Request for Proposals (RFP). The primary goals of this project were to identify baseline idling statistics for a selected set of test vehicles, identify excessive idling situations, identify stationary idling during work activities, and approximate fuel use for Caltrans vehicles under the various usage categories. A commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) system was used in each vehicle for GPS-based location, data sensing, and communications. AHMCT developed vehicle and task-dependent criteria to define conditions for active work, and the needed trigger inputs to the commercial system to identify periods of active work. AHMCT instrumented a diverse fleet of 30 Caltrans vehicles, and supported extensive field data collection over at least a year for each instrumented vehicle. In addition, AHMCT developed the necessary back-end database (DB) and front-end user interface (UI) to support researcher and Caltrans visualization and analysis of the resulting data set. This report includes analysis of the data set, summary reports, and a discussion of the visualization and analysis tools. Based on the quantitative data and analysis, the report provides recommendations for improvement in equipment and procedures. For example, there are cases where it may be reasonable to install idle shutdown systems in Caltrans vehicles in order to reduce idle time and fuel consumption without impacting task execution.