Suggested Citation:
Pahwa, Anmol and Miguel Jaller (2024)

Evaluating Private and System-Wide Impacts of Freight Eco-Routing

Freight is crucial for economic development, but the trucks hauling this freight significantly contribute towards greenhouse gas emissions, advancing global climate change and criteria pollutant emissions that affect local community health. Hence, this work explores the opportunities and challenges associated with freight eco-routing to mitigate these freight-related externalities in Southern California. To this end, the authors establish the private impacts of a single carrier eco-routing its fleet of freight vehicles with a point-to-point routing tool. Further, the authors investigate network-wide freight eco- routing's system effects with the novel origin-based algorithm for multi-class Traffic Assignment by Paired Alternative Segments (mTAPAS). Overall, the study showcases the potential opportunities with freight eco-routing in reducing transportation-related externalities. However, it also highlights implementation challenges due to a lack of monetary incentives for carriers and regulators to account for these externalities in their decision-making.