Chapter 14: Capacity Utilisation of Vehicles for Road Freight Transport

This chapter discusses a central aspect of freight transportation – capacity utilisation with a link to empty running of commercial freight vehicles. It provides an overview of the literature on these topics and groups the contributions into two segments according to their analytical approach and origin of research. The first approach looks at utilisation based on economic theories such as the firms’ objective to maximise profitability and considers how various firm and haul (market) characteristics influence utilisation. The second approach stems from the transport modelling literature and its main aim is analysing vehicle movement and usage in transport demand modelling context. A strand of this second group of contributions is the modelling of trip-chain and its implication on the level of capacity utilisation. A key lesson from the reviewed studies is that it is important to take into account the commercial activity that initiates vehicle movements to evaluate performance. It appears that there is room for further enrichment of the modelling exercise by incorporating information regarding the operator to give a stronger behavioural basis for the vehicle movements and utilisation analysis.