First Ever Inter-Agency Pooled Fund Partnership for Freight Data Acquisition

Challenge 

While obtaining freight data aligns with our data-driven policies and objectives, the price tag for the highest quality data sources is prohibitively expensive for Caltrans to purchase on its own. The path forward was through the innovative and challenging proposition of organizing a multi-agency effort to pool statewide resources together to fund the purchase. Forming inter-agency state partnerships to pool funding is an enormous task, requiring trust, commitment, and a tremendous amount of logistics and administration. 

Solution 

As a result of the efforts from a few dedicated Caltrans Planners, our Department has access to the richest data set of commercial vehicle data that we've ever had available to us. This data has far-reaching implications for the Department, including benefits to Transportation Planner, Traffic Operations, Asset Management, Maintenance, the Director's Office of Equity, Sustainability, and Tribal Affairs, and many other functional units.  

Result  

This data provides a more comprehensive understanding of statewide truck patterns. While previously, access to truck data was rudimentary, understanding only a high-level of trucking characteristics, such as annual average truck volume. This purchase enables to better study the what, when, where, and why of freight:

• Truck origins and destinations

• Truck vocations and commodities

• Truck trip purpose

• Truck bottlenecks

• Popular truck routes

• Truck classifications

• Truck hard stopping hot spots  

Project Contact:  

Lale Tiejiao - Lale.Tiejiao@dot.ca.gov

Stephen Yoon - Stephen.Yoon@dot.ca.gov