Mapping Overweight Vehicle Permits for Pavement Engineering Applications

Abstract

Oversize-overweight (OSOW) permit programs allow carriers to move large, heavy, and often high-value freight on state and federal highways. This study analyzed six years of Wisconsin single-trip overweight permits and two years of Iowa single-trip overweight permits to visualize routing trends, identify heavily travelled highway segments, and provide support for mechanistic-empirical pavement design guide (MEPDG) analyses and pavement reliability research. The methodology used custom visual basic for applications (VBA) scripts for text parsing and route processing with results linked to a geographic information system (GIS) database. The results allowed for visualization of permit traffic, geospatial queries of permit routes, origin-destination analyses, and identification of heavily-used permit vehicle corridors. These results have numerous applications for highway design, bridge engineering, freight trend analysis, and highway system planning. Additionally, the methodology supports the generation of site-specific permit truck axle load spectra for integration into AASHTOWare MEPDG software traffic inputs. This methodology can improve the estimation of pavement damage from overweight permit vehicles, and results can inform OSOW program policies and assist in optimizing the permit issuance process.