Transport professionals at the local level often have difficulty incorporating freight into transport models and plans because freight data is proprietary at local levels requiring extensive aggregation to national levels before being released to the public. Understanding freight activity and factors affecting freight activity are extremely important for modeling infrastructure supply to transport demand and for assessing potential investment and operational strategies. This paper presents research into a national freight origin/destination database and attempts to develop disaggregation techniques using a collection of local factors: population, employment, personal income, and value of shipments. A case study of the disaggregation is performed using the Federal Analysis Framework Version 2 Database, which is a national freight database for the United States and attempts to disaggregate the data for use in a statewide or local transport model. A case study is presented that addresses the disaggregation for Alabama, comprising two zones at the national level into 67 counties at the state level. The case study uses Cube/TRANPLAN to model disaggregated freight data on a statewide network. The results of the cast study indicate that personal income and value of shipment provide slightly better results than using population and employment.
Using a Federal Database and New Factors for Disaggregation of Freight to Local Level