Freight Modelling

Truck movements are typically included in traffic modelling. The size and number of trucks impacts the overall behaviour of the traffic flows.

Freight modelling and analyses of commercial vehicles differs from other transport modelling in three aspects:

freight modelling is about the movement of commodities
not all the links in a city-wide road network are able to be used by all truck types, for example many local roads have weight limits and therefore cannot be used by the heavy commercial vehicles, and
not all the origins and destinations in a city wide network are used in the heavy vehicle trip matrix. Typically for the heavy commercial vehicles only the origins and destinations which correspond to the distribution/warehousing/intermodal zones or centres of a city are used.

Transport Modelling has extensive experience in freight modelling. Examples of the range of our work are given below. The studies include rail operations, greenhouse gas abatement measures for urban freight as well as analyses of commercial vehicles at the city wide level and more localised study areas.

Portfolio

South East Queensland Urban Commercial Goods and Services, TMR, Queensland

Nix was a project manager and a lead modeller of an international team (Australians and Canadians) of experts to perform an advisory role in guidance and support TMR to develop a plan to undertake a commercial goods and services travel survey. This survey once complete will inform the commercial component of the BNE model. This undertaking is first time implemented in Australia.

Implementation of the Heavy Vehicle Matrix into the Wagga Wagga Traffic Model and Bomen Industrial Study

Transport Modelling enhanced the Wagga Wagga Traffic Model with the heavy vehicle matrix, and then used the enhanced model to study the proposed Bomen Industrial Estate.

The study examined the access to and from the Bomen Industrial Estate, as well as the impacts on intersections throughout the City of Wagga Wagga. The outcome of the study was that the NSW Department of Planning approved the development of the Bomen Industrial Estate.

Freight — Figure 4: Heavy vehicle trips for Wagga Wagga.

SIMTA Intermodal

Sydney Intermodal Terminal Alliance (SIMTA) is proposing to build a freight intermodal at Moorebank. Transport Modelling reviewed the publically available documentation and found that the modelled numbers were vastly different from our expected numbers.

Transport Modelling have presented their finding to the NSW government and these findings were well received, and much appreciated.

Enhancing Future Freight Demand

Transport Modelling was asked to assist with the enhancing of the future freight demand for an Australian Capital City.

This work involved the manipulation of the freight demand matrix in a manner to reflect the differential growth and growth capacities of the existing and future freight centres in the city, as well as incorporating the distances between the centres. In addition the future growth at the screen lines was also used in the matrix estimation. This results in a very complex demand adjustment exercise.

The work was incorporated into the city’s strategic model.

Assessing Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Abatement Measures on Urban Freight

This study was undertaken for the Australia Greenhouse Office, and was carried out by the CSIRO, Kilsby Australia and the University of South Australia.

Transport Modelling supported Kilsby Australia by undertaking all the Sydney Strategic Travel Model (STM) runs for this study. The modelling required the multi-class assignment process and extracting all the traffic flow details for the passenger vehicle and each of the commercial vehicle classes. The modelled outputs were post-processed for greenhouse gas emissions at the University of South Australia.

A significant component of the work involved translating policy measures into scenarios which could be modelled in a meaningful way. This required the full understanding and limitations of the STM. The Policy instruments included infrastructure and land use measures, vehicle movement measures and vehicle measures.

The study showed objectively that that policy instruments such as:

General reduced congestion
Better traffic management
Higher load factors
Real time traffic information
Sydney orbital road
Orbital with land use change

reduce VHT, trip length as well as emissions. It is stated in the report that this is contrary to industry trends towards lower load factors and ‘just in time’ deliveries, which are likely to increase emissions.

This newly developed method of assessing greenhouse gases was expected to be generally applicable to all Australian cities and potentially applicable to cities elsewhere. Refer to the paper ‘Assessing Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Abatement Measures on Urban Freight'.This paper and its variations were published many times in different forums.