Highway Impact Assessment: Techniques and Procedures for Transportation Planners and Managers

Railroad branch-line abandonment, grain subterminals, and major changes in rural land use and transportation patterns are generating heavy truck traffic on low-volume collector and arterial highways. Unfortunately, these changes are occurring at a time when America's highway network is under-funded and deteriorating. Tolliver presents an integrated set of methods for projecting the effects of rail-line abandonment and rural land-use changes on future highway costs. This unique book is analytical yet practical. It provides intuitive insights into the complex forces that generate truck traffic and lead to the deterioration of pavements and, at the same time, contains many useful and replicable formulas, techniques, and models.

Unlike existing texts in highway engineering, this book focuses on freight transportation demand and the modeling of heavy truck traffic flows. Through the use of theoretical and applied concepts in transportation demand, mathematical programming, and network analysis, a set of procedures for modeling heavy truck traffic is formulated. Then, using life-cycle pavement concepts, a methodology for forecasting the financial effects of incremental heavy truck traffic is constructed. The impact assessment techniques are illustrated through the use of two real-world examples: (1) the location of a large grain subterminal elevator and (2) the abandonment of a railroad mainline. In each case, the concepts of freight demand forecasting, truck traffic simulation, and pavement deterioration analysis are applied to actual data and events.