by Erik Vargas, Swapnil Samant and Rafael Aldrete For anyone who regularly crosses the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, “wait time” is not a single experience. A trusted traveler using a dedicated lane may be through the port in minutes, while a driver in a standard lane could be waiting an hour or more, especially…
by Erik Vargas and Okan Gurbuz
In its 2020 Texas Statewide Truck Parking Study, the Texas Department of Transportation noted that trucks carrying 1.2 billion tons of freight worth $1.7 trillion each year in the Lone Star State. That means 140,000 trucks must park somewhere in the state every day for drivers to rest and sleep. Noted in the study, truck volume is expected to grow by some 80 percent by 2040, making today’s shortage of truck parking facilities a crisis down the road.
E-inspections of trucks offer an alternative to traditional weigh-station inspections, which require hands-on human interaction and delay drivers. Inspections can be automated to a great extent by leveraging technology without compromising safety, thereby achieving efficiencies and improving accuracy of inspection data. This video provides an overview of e-inspections, especially as they relate to cross-border freight…
Quick and seamless passage across the U.S.-Mexico border has long been the Holy Grail for any commercial interest whose success depends on transportation efficiency.
Currently, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) publishes the number of lanes open at the land ports of entry (LPOEs) on their website. This information is updated once every hour in most cases. However, it has been observed that in some cases this information is not updated for several hours, and in other cases, the…
In a reliable transportation system, motorists know with a high degree of certainty when they will arrive to their destination. Numerous factors directly affect reliability such as signal timing, work zones, incidents, unusually high demand, special events, weather, and the performance of complementary and competing modes). The purpose of a travel-time reliability monitoring system (TTRMS)…
In the transportation research business, we use the term “performance measurement” when we measure how a certain aspect of our transportation system is operating. For example, through crash reporting we can tell you with certainty how safe a road is operating, or, through commute times, how well traffic is flowing. Safety and mobility of a roadway are fairly easy to determine.
