New Data Platforms Can Help Fill Gaps in Understanding Truck Travel in California

Determining where trucks are traveling is crucial for planning and maintaining transportation networks. In California, information about truck movements is primarily derived from a network of fixed monitoring stations. These include weigh-in-motion stations (truck scales) and traffic count stations. Information from these locations can be used to classify passing trucks (light, medium, or heavy-duty), determine their travel direction, and estimate their proportion of the general traffic; however, the data provides limited information about trip origins and destinations and the routes taken in between stations. Estimating truck movements within a region thus largely depends on extrapolating data between known collection points. While this can be done with relative ease in simple networks containing few alternate routes, it can be a difficult task in complex networks without significantly increasing the number of fixed monitoring stations.