GIS to Identify Strategic Freight Corridors in Texas
Brian W. Craig and C. Michael Walton, University of Texas at Austin, February 2002, 140 pp. (467504-1)
The goals of this report are to identify the strategic freight corridors (SFC) in the state of Texas. Freight corridors can be defined for various modes of transportation. For this project, however, only the truck mode was evaluated. A model was created to identify areas of economic significance within the state. For the purpose of data collection, the county was used as the analysis region.
The model developed identified the economically significant counties in the state using economic and non-economic data to capture the demand to move goods within a county. The economic data consisted of the county income date for the five largest industries in the state that required a significant demand to transport goods. The non-economic income data consisted of dummy variables that modeled the presence of intermodal and border crossing facilities. A final score for each county was computed by assigning the weighting factor to the scores for each criterion and summing up each criterion score. A cutoff value was calculated to determine the economic significance of a county.
Forty-six counties were determined to be economically significant. The SFC network was selected by identifying the economically significant counties and then interconnecting these counties with a minimal network that was not too circuitous.
A sensitivity test was performed to determine how the model’s weighting scheme affected the selection of highways for the SFC network. This sensitivity test revealed that the weighting scheme had no effect on the selection of highways for the SFC network.
Keywords: ITS, GIS, Freight Corridors
ENTIRE REPORT (Adobe Acrobat File – 2.4 MB)