National Center for Sustainable Transportation

To ensure the efficiency and reliability of freight movement, California has invested a great deal in building and maintaining its freight infrastructure, but these investments are far outpaced by the rapid growth in both passenger and freight demand. The result is increased congestion, especially at bottlenecks where delays are severe.

This research was motivated by new provisions in the 2016 Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, which require states to consider the impact of significant freight congestion or delays on the broader transportation system. However, conventional methods of evaluating freight congestion, such as identifying freight bottlenecks, focus on how these bottlenecks affect freight transport. This research provides a statewide assessment of freight movement on all traffic congestion. It defines freight impact areas as severely congested roadway corridors with high volumes of trucks.

View the NCST Project Webpage