UC Irvine Institute of Transportation Studies

Trucks have a significant impact on infrastructure, traffic congestion, energy consumption, pollution and quality of life. To better understand truck characteristics, comprehensive high resolution truck data is needed. Higher quality truck data can enable more accurate estimates of GHGs and emissions, allow for better management of infrastructure, provide insight to truck travel behavior, and enhance freight forecasting. Currently, truck traffic data is collected through limited means and with limited detail. Agencies can obtain or estimate truck travel statistics from surveys, inductive loop detectors (ILD) and weigh-in-motion (WIM) stations, or from manual counts, each of which have various limitations. Of these sources, WIM and ILD seem to be the most promising tools for capturing detailed truck information. Axle spacing and weight from existing WIM devices and unique inductive signatures indicative of body type from ILDs equipped with high sampling rate detector cards are complementary data sources that can be integrated to provide a synergistic resource that otherwise does not exist in practice, a resource that is able to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional truck data collection methods by providing data that is detailed, link specific, temporally continuous, up-to-date, and representative of the full truck population. This integrated data resource lends itself very readily toward detailed truck body classification which is presented as a case study. This body classification model is able to predict 35 different trailer body types for FHWA class 9 semi-tractors, achieving an 80 percent correct classification rate. In addition to the body classification model, the large data set resulting from the case study is itself a valuable and novel resource for truck studies.