Spatial investigation of mineral transportation characteristics in the state of Washington

Hayk Khachatryan

The aggregates industry in Washington is a major provider of construction materials such as sand and gravel, crushed stone and, as such, plays vital role in the state's infrastructural development. Availability of aggregates in general can affect the support for regional economic development since one of the biggest consumers of the aggregates industry is the transportation industry. High quality aggregates are used for maintenance and repair of state highways to increase the durability of state highways, as well as for the development of new roads. With the growing traffic volume on state highways and increasing durability standards, the demand for construction aggregate continues to grow. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the transportation and operational characteristics of Washington's mined products, using the data from the survey conducted for Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT). As a part of a six year comprehensive research and implementation project - Strategic Freight Transportation Analysis (SFTA), the study investigates needs of the mining industry as they pertain to Washington's road networks. Data collected from this survey will help to inform both the location and type of need for road maintenance and improvements. To achieve that purpose, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is used as an analytical tool to create desired maps and to analyze spatial relationship between mine locations and road system. Maps containing locations of mines were created based a GIS coverage file provided by Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Division of Geology and Earth Resources (DGER). County and highway system GIS files were obtained from the WSDOT GeoData Distribution Catalog. Further, the survey data is used to study spatial correlation of Washington's mines and road networks, as well as an attempt to measure mining industry's "contribution" to Washington's roads usage and potential deterioration. Many studies have examined the relationship between transportation cost and construction unit productivity, but there's minimal information available pertaining to the relationship between payload weights, shipment distances and highway deterioration. Thus, as a first step in a series of forthcoming studies, the spatial relationships between aggregates shipments and hauling trucks' payload weights are examined more closely. Spatial non-stationarity of the data is possible whenever any process takes place over many different geographical locations. Therefore, the study employs a spatial error model with distance based weights matrix to address spatial autocorrelation, to capture the interaction between spatial units, and to predict the incremental change in payload weights resulting from increasing hauling distance. Results show a highly significant positive relationship between payload weights and increasing shipment distances.

Spatial investigation of mineral transportation characteristics in the state of Washington

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