Book Description

Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) is a critical measure of highway system performance used extensively in highway transportation management not only for reporting to oversight agencies such as the FHWA but also as an input for financial analysis, resource allocation, and impact assessments. In the current era as highway revenue from fuel taxes continues to fall and direct user charging such as VMT fees become increasingly attractive, consistent and reliable VMT estimates have become critical for evaluating highway funding options. In the current practice at most highway agencies including the Indiana DOT, there exists several alternative methods for VMT estimation that typically yield a spectrum of estimates that are inconsistent and for certain methods, even inaccurate. This study was commissioned by the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) to develop a benchmark method for VMT estimation and to provide calibration factors for adjusting the VMT estimates derived from the other VMT estimation methods. The benchmark method used in this study was a segment-level framework that decomposes the entire road inventory into links and for each link, determining the product of the traffic volume and the inventory length. For the state highway system, the entire population was used; a comprehensive database was developed which facilitates extensive aggregations of VMT by geographical scope, route, functional class, and vehicle class. For the local roads, a sample of counties of different spatial locations and degrees of urbanization were used, and cluster analysis, geographic information systems (GIS), and spatial interpolation techniques were used to expand the VMT estimates from the local road samples to the population of all counties in the state. The results of this study indicate that there is significant variation, with respect to the benchmark method, of the VMT estimates of the other estimation methods. An implementation platform was developed in this study to produce outcomes that address the VMT data needs of the intended end users and stakeholders; this can be expanded to include new roads in future. It was determined that the current statewide VMT (2013) is 78 billion vehicle-miles, which is expected to grow to 95 billion vehicle miles in 2035.