Commercial vehicle travel patterns in urban areas: Findings and implications from the denver metropolitan area

This paper is motivated by a need to examine the characteristics of commercial vehicle movements in an urban area. It studied the aggregate travel patterns of commercial vehicle movements in urban areas, i.e., the trip length distributions, the tour length distributions and the affecting factors of them, using a travel diary data collected by the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) for the Denver Metropolitan area, Colorado, USA. The detailed statistical analyses reveal that the mean trip travel time and mean tour travel time of commercial vehicles vary by vehicle body type, fleet size and type of the company where the vehicles belong to. Meanwhile, the regression modeling results indicate that the trip airline distance and the vehicle body types are good predictors for trip travel time while the tour airline distance and the number of stops along a tour can be used to determine tour travel time.