SPONSOR: Metropolitan Transportation Improvement Program

BUDGET: $179,000

ABSTRACT: Freight transportation makes up a substantial portion of the daily vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the Portland metropolitan area and is vital for the region's economic vitality. Further, truck movements on the Portland area freeway system are impacted heavily by congestion and in turn have a major safety impact. While it is possible to monitor and manage the movement of vehicles on the freeway system via an extensive traffic management operations system, it is currently not possible to determine how many trucks are traveling on the freeway system on an ongoing basis. In order to effectively manage our freeway transportation system today and plan for tomorrow, the region desperately needs a system for monitoring truck flows on the freeways. Fortunately, this can be achieved at a very low cost and will allow cities, counties, the Port of Portland, Metro, and ODOT to reap huge benefits immediately. Typically truck counts are obtained via labor intensive measurement techniques at a small number of locations on one or two days. This new system will enable permanent count/classification stations to be established at more than 50 locations, on a permanent basis. These data will be archived at Portland State University as part of the region's transportation data archiving program and will be available to all regional agencies via an Internet website. This project will consist of new hardware to be installed in ramp meter controllers throughout the Portland metropolitan area, plus communications upgrades, software modifications and data archiving improvements to allow for permanent truck counts (at 20-second intervals, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year) at more than 50 locations on the freeway mainline in the metro area.

Read the MTIP Proposal