Feasibility of Using Cellular Telephone Data to Determine the Truckshed of Intermodal Facilities

This paper analyzes the feasibility of using cellular telephone location data to determine the geographic extent of trucks from intermodal facilities. The feasibility analysis includes three aspects: location technology, cell phone penetration, and truck tracking methodology. As the results shows, the cell phone location technology is able to provide accurate location data. It can provide updated location information with no time limitation. Cell phones could be located within an average of 100 meters or less of their actual position. Although only partial cell phone data are available for the truck tracking system, a larger sample size is expected during a longer time period observation when more cell phone data are integrated. The principle and process of truck filtering and tracking from the cell phone database was proposed in this study. To extract trucks from the cell phone data, the analysis network should be categorized into several types of regions based on the land use and truck movement characters. In principle, those tracked cell phones frequently located around truck stops and traveling along the Intestate routes are considered as trucks. Further field study is needed to verify the accuracy of the truck identification and derive the calibration factor for generating truck trips using cell phone location data.