Mapping Overweight Vehicle Permits for Pavement Engineering Applications

AbstractOversize-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 generatio...