Connected Vehicle Information for Improving Safety Related to Unknown or Inadequate Truck Parking (TTI-06-01)

Project Description: Safety issues that stem from commercial truck parking shortages are a national concern. National hours-of-service (HOS) regulations limit drivers’ time on the road, in an attempt to increase safety by limiting fatigue; thereby, creating a need for drivers to locate safe, secure, and legal parking wherever they are when or before they hit their limits. In addition, the recent rule mandating the use of electronic logging devices (ELD) to electronically record a driver’s Record of Duty Status (RODS), replacing the HOS paper logbooks, further exacerbates drivers’ needs to find adequate parking. If drive time is exhausted where there is no nearby truck parking, drivers may park in unsafe or unauthorized locations to meet HOS requirements or they may continue to drive while fatigued. As a result, there are intrinsic safety impacts to all highway users due to large trucks parking in unsafe locations or truck drivers driving past their allotted hours. And, with the projected growth of truck traffic, the demand for adequate truck parking will continue to outpace the supply of public and private parking facilities. The current study will help transportation agencies in developing solutions to the parking availability problem by identifying effective methods for using data to estimate truck parking demand and areas of parking opportunity, assessing available data sources for estimating truck parking demand and supply, and determining the safest connected vehicle (CV) solutions for distributing information on parking availability directly to drivers. INRIX data was provided as an in-kind match. Other data was collected from publicly available data sources. Data Scope: This project used proprietary INRIX for March 2019 and crash data from 2019-2021 that was provided by the Maryland State Highway Administration. While the raw data is unavailable, the final outputs for the repurposed data are included. The Land Use/Land Cover data was retrieved from the Maryland’s GIS open portal. The High-Res land cover data was retrieved from the Chesapeake Conservancy. The terrain ruggedness was calculated based elevation data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Citations for the publicly available datasets are found below: Maryland Property Data - Parcel Points. Maryland's GIS Data Catalog. (September 8, 2017). Retrieved November 2021, from https://data.imap.maryland.gov/datasets/maryland::maryland-property-data-parcel-points/about. The National Map (TNM) Datasets. Elevation Products (3DEP). U.S. Geological Survey. (n.d.). Retrieved November 2021, from https://apps.nationalmap.gov/datasets/. Land Cover Data Project 2013/2014. Chesapeake Conservancy. (n.d.). Retrieved November 2021, from https://www.chesapeakeconservancy.org/conservation-innovation-center/high-resolution-data/land-cover-data-project/. Maryland Land Use Land Cover - Land Use Land Cover 2010. Maryland's GIS Data Catalog. (February 21, 2018). Retrieved November 2021, from https://data.imap.maryland.gov/datasets/maryland::maryland-land-use-land-cover-land-use-land-cover-2010/about. Data Specification: See PDF Data Dictionary attached.