California Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey

This project is to support development of the California Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey (CA-VIUS), which will focus on freight related vehicles operating in California, with questions designed to obtain annual freight truck activities, operational characteristics, physical characteristics, and the types of commodities carried at the state level. The survey results are needed for the development and validation of the Emissions Factors (EMFAC) model for the California Air Resources Board (CARB), since its assumptions for base and target years are based on VIUS data including vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and commodity and truck fleet characteristics. The survey results are also expected to yield key insights on the inventory and flow of different types of commodities and truck fleets that are critical for statewide freight travel demand modeling as well as forecasting transportation energy demand by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) and the California Energy Commission (CEC). Following the discontinuation of the VIUS at the national level by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2002, it has become a challenge to obtain equivalent data for satisfying the aforementioned needs. Thus, this first phase of the CA-VIUS study is proposed to build an appropriate survey framework as well as to implement a pilot survey in California in an effort to provide the necessary update of freight movement data for the State of California. The final deliverables of this project will include the following: the proposed survey sample design with associated supporting methodology and data analysis, digitized pilot survey data with completed survey response sheets, statistical analysis of pilot survey results, freight related factors generated from pilot survey results, and a final report including a comprehensive survey framework, procedure, pilot survey implementation issues, and the corresponding responses to pilot survey implementation issues. While the pilot survey will only cover a selected sub-region of California based on the developed comprehensive survey framework, the pilot survey is expected to provide guidelines and be combined with later surveys applicable to the entire state of California, including the sub-region of the pilot survey.