Commodity flow estimation models incorporating land use characteristics and economic factors

Abstract

This paper describes how reliably forecasting of freight demand has become essential in freight transportation management in order to systematically plan for future transportation facility needs. The paper shows how land use is one of the key factors that affect commodity flow. Other factors include location factors, physical factors, operational factors, dynamic factors such as seasonal variations in demand and changes in customers’ tastes, and pricing factors. Modeling commodity flows with land use is one possible first step; however, it has some limitations because land use data lacks detailed information on economic activities, in particular land use. Therefore, models that use land use characteristics instead of aggregate land use type data were developed in this paper using the commodity flow data available from the 2002 Commodity Flow Survey and other data available to the public via the Internet. These models were used to estimate commodity flow in 2007 and their estimates were compared with commodity flow values found in the 2007 Commodity Flow Survey. Results of this comparison showed that the models could produce good estimates of commodity flows and are of practical use because the model’s input data are available free via the Internet.