Passenger car equivalent travel time of a truck

Abstract

• Differences in the average travel time of trucks compared to passenger cars by area type. • Average travel times differ by day-of-the-week and time-of-the-day. • Difference in the average travel time tends to decrease with an increase in the reference speed. • Average travel time of trucks could be up to 1.18 times that of passenger cars. The Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) recommends the use of passenger car equivalent (PCE) to account for the influence of trucks on the operational performance of roads. Researchers have derived PCE based on capacity, headway, queue discharge, and delay in the past. However, it is not clear if the influence of trucks on the operational performance of roads would be the same in terms of travel time. The focus of this research is to assess the influence of trucks on the transportation system performance from a travel time perspective. The travel time data for Mecklenburg County (urban area) and Iredell County (rural area) were gathered for the year 2017 and processed to generate sixty-nine datasets accounting for the area type, temporal variation, reference speed, and traffic condition. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression models were then developed to examine the relationship between the travel time of trucks (dependent variable) and the travel time of passenger cars (explanatory variable). The coefficients indicate that the average travel time (ATT) of trucks is greater than the ATT of passenger cars irrespective of the dataset used for analysis, except in two cases of Iredell County. The ATT of trucks could be up to 1.18 times the ATT of passenger cars in some cases. The area type, day-of-the-week (DOW), time-of-the-day (TOD), reference speed of the link, and traffic condition at the time of data collection all seem to influence the ATT of trucks at different scales compared to the ATT of passenger cars.