Project number: MT-11-20

Funding source: Caltrans

Total cost: $40,000

Performance period: August 2010 to July 2011

The economic recession in 2007 coincided with rising oil prices and an overall decline in traffic volume nationwide. This project focuses on truck traffic on the Long Beach Freeway (I-710), which connects the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to railyards and other freeways. We explore various factors that could have affected truck traffic on this freeway, such as economic conditions, diesel prices, possible modal substitutions, and port policies. To identify these factors and help us develop a model to disentangle the effects of these factors on truck traffic, we conduct a comprehensive literature review of the research on this topic. We present summary statistics of the data that were collected for this project, and discuss the steps for future research.