How truckers make travel decisions

Truck traffic is undoubtedly on the rise with heavy vehicles now representing a large portion of the revenue generated on toll projects. So, it literally pays to understand the behavior of trucks in toll forecasting projects.

The traditional method of conducting a travel survey, by intercepting travelers on their daily commutes, can work well for passenger vehicles. However, when it comes to heavy vehicles, the behavioral decision-makers are very rarely the drivers themselves. Rather, the route is planned at the truck company’s headquarters, so alternative methods must be considered and carried out to reach these decision-makers.

Measuring responses
As part of two recent projects, SDG investigated the likely behavioral responses of travel decision-makers. We tried two approaches: contracting a market research firm to conduct a scripted telephone survey with the individuals at trucking companies who are responsible for making routing decisions, and conducting a series of interviews with representatives of a cross-section of trucking companies that operate in the study area.

The results
From these investigations, it became clear that the type of trucking company and their business model is likely to greatly influence their choices. We summarize some of the key findings below:

• Willingness to pay the toll will be impacted by the ability to pass the toll on to customers; this is most probable for companies who can exercise pricing power with their shippers.
• Owner-operators are more likely to avoid tolls than company drivers who are often prescribed a route from a dispatcher.
• Dispatchers, and the software programs they utilize, will consider tolls as one of the factors in the vehicle operating cost that are used to determine routings.
• Vehicle operating costs can vary widely from owner-operator ($0.80 - $1.20 / mile range quoted) compared to companies that employ drivers (operating costs of up to $1.75 were quoted).
  The travel time savings offered by point toll projects hold much greater value to short-distance (ie delivery) companies compared to long-distance drivers.

There is strong agreement with a statement that trucking companies would use a toll facility if it significantly increased productivity. The greater travel time reliability offered by the toll facilities increases the willingness to pay the toll when making timedependent deliveries, such as FedEx and UPS packages or perishable products.

​Conclusion
The behavioral responses of heavy vehicles are much more complex than those of passenger vehicles. While various factors suggest that trucks should have a higher willingness to pay a toll for travel time savings than passenger vehicles, there is no clear consensus on how much higher. Therefore, it is becoming necessary to create specific estimates for each corridor based on the composition of the freight operators in the corridor and their business models.