At head of title: National Cooperative Highway Research Program.

A specific Vcost model was developed for Texas conditions based on a sophisticated fuel model for light duty vehicles, several excellent sources of secondary vehicle cost data, and the ability to measure heavy truck fuel consumption through both experimental and survey work. The basic model was designed to address the relatively narrow range of pavement roughness found on the Texas highway network and is free-flow, and does not accurately measure congestion effects. The team developed a vehicle classification scheme that was suitable for TxDOT planning and revenue forecasting. These resources led to the adoption of eight categories of light-duty vehicles and two heavy truck types. The current Texas fleet composition was determined from 2007 VTR data and was made a default for model use. Each cost item associated with the representative vehicle was calculated for each year of operation up to 20 years. Six main cost categories are included in the Vcost model: depreciation, financing, insurance, other fixed costs, repair and maintenance, and fuel. These costs fall into two categories: fixed and variable costs. The Vcost model can provide operating cost estimates for each specific representative vehicles as well as fleets of vehicles. The model allows the user to change key parameters so that the cost calculation is specific to any particular situation, and can be updated as the economic or technological landscape changes. The model was designed to provide the user with a program that looked, felt, and operated in a similar fashion to most Windows programs and would be intuitive for the typical TxDOT user.

This book provides information concerning the costs of transportation on non-urban highways and the relationships between these costs and characteristics of highways such as surface roughness, and vertical and horizontal geometry. The sources of the information presented here are four major road user cost studies performed between 1970 and 1982 in Kenya, the Caribbean, Brazil, and India. In these studies road user costs were investigated in considerable depth. Surveys of commercial road users were performed, surveys on a far larger scale than had been conducted prior to the 1970s. Large scale experiments were undertaken, aimed at determining the fuel consumption of cars, buses and light and heavy goods vehicles under alternative highway conditions, and considerable effort was devoted to obtaining data on vehicle speeds and their responses to highway conditions. The resulting body of knowledge concerning road users' costs is enormous, spanning three continents, diverse highway conditions and radically different economic environments.

The light-duty vehicle fleet is expected to undergo substantial technological changes over the next several decades. New powertrain designs, alternative fuels, advanced materials and significant changes to the vehicle body are being driven by increasingly stringent fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission standards. By the end of the next decade, cars and light-duty trucks will be more fuel efficient, weigh less, emit less air pollutants, have more safety features, and will be more expensive to purchase relative to current vehicles. Though the gasoline-powered spark ignition engine will continue to be the dominant powertrain configuration even through 2030, such vehicles will be equipped with advanced technologies, materials, electronics and controls, and aerodynamics. And by 2030, the deployment of alternative methods to propel and fuel vehicles and alternative modes of transportation, including autonomous vehicles, will be well underway. What are these new technologies - how will they work, and will some technologies be more effective than others? Written to inform The United States Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards, this new report from the National Research Council is a technical evaluation of costs, benefits, and implementation issues of fuel reduction technologies for next-generation light-duty vehicles. Cost, Effectiveness, and Deployment of Fuel Economy Technologies for Light-Duty Vehicles estimates the cost, potential efficiency improvements, and barriers to commercial deployment of technologies that might be employed from 2020 to 2030. This report describes these promising technologies and makes recommendations for their inclusion on the list of technologies applicable for the 2017-2025 CAFE standards.

This study estimates the operating costs for commercial vehicle operators in Minnesota. A survey of firms that undertake commercial truck road movements was performed. The average operating cost per kilometer for commercial vehicle operators was calculated from the survey responses. Results show that the translog and Cobb-Douglas models have approximately equal explanatory power in estimating the total cost from the data. The models also revealed the presence of nearly constant returns to scale, a finding consistent with earlier studies; an increase in output (total truckloads) of 1% increases total costs by 1.04%.

Technologies and Approaches to Reducing the Fuel Consumption of Medium- and Heavy-Duty Vehicles evaluates various technologies and methods that could improve the fuel economy of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, such as tractor-trailers, transit buses, and work trucks. The book also recommends approaches that federal agencies could use to regulate these vehicles' fuel consumption. Currently there are no fuel consumption standards for such vehicles, which account for about 26 percent of the transportation fuel used in the U.S. The miles-per-gallon measure used to regulate the fuel economy of passenger cars. is not appropriate for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, which are designed above all to carry loads efficiently. Instead, any regulation of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles should use a metric that reflects the efficiency with which a vehicle moves goods or passengers, such as gallons per ton-mile, a unit that reflects the amount of fuel a vehicle would use to carry a ton of goods one mile. This is called load-specific fuel consumption (LSFC). The book estimates the improvements that various technologies could achieve over the next decade in seven vehicle types. For example, using advanced diesel engines in tractor-trailers could lower their fuel consumption by up to 20 percent by 2020, and improved aerodynamics could yield an 11 percent reduction. Hybrid powertrains could lower the fuel consumption of vehicles that stop frequently, such as garbage trucks and transit buses, by as much 35 percent in the same time frame.