The units of transportation measurement describes the unit of measurement used to measure the quantity and traffic of transportation used in transportation statistics, planning, and their related fields.
Transportation quantity
The currently popular units are:
Length of journey
kilometre or kilometer is a metric unit used to measure the length of a journey outside the US;
nautical mile is rarely used to derive units of transportation quantity.
Traffic flow
vehicle-kilometre as a measure of traffic flow, determined by multiplying the number of vehicles on a given road or traffic network by the average length of their trips measured in kilometres.
vehicle-mile same as before but measures the trip expressed in miles.
Passenger
Payload quantity
passenger or person
Passenger-distance
Passenger-distance is the distance travelled by passengers on transit vehicles; determined by multiplying the number of unlinked passenger trips by the average length of their trips.
passenger-kilometre or pkm internationally;
passenger-mile sometimes in the US; 1 pmi = 1.609344 pkm
Passengers per bus hour
A system may carry a high number of passengers per distance but a relatively low number of passengers per bus hour if vehicles operate in congested areas and thus travel at slower speed.
Passengers per bus distance
A transit system serving a community with a widely dispersed population must operate circuitous routes that tend to carry fewer passengers per distance. A higher number is more favorable.
Freight
A simple unit of freight is the kilogram-kilometre, the service of moving one kilogram of payload a distance of one kilometre.
The dimension of the measure is the product of the payload mass and the distance transported.
Example
A semi truck traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago carrying 14 short tons of cargo delivers a service of 14 * 2,015 = 28,210 ton-miles of freight.
Intermodal containers
traffic is commonly measured in twenty-foot equivalent units, rather than cargo weight, e.g. a TEU-km would be the equivalent of one twenty-foot container transported one kilometer.
Transportation density
Transportation density can be defined as the payload per period, say passenger / day or tonne / day. This can be used as the measure of intensity of the transportation on a particular section or point of transportation infrastructure, say road or railway. This can be used in comparison with the construction, running costs of the infrastructure.
Fatalities by VMT
Fatalities by VMT is a unit for assessing road traffic fatalities. This metric is computed by dividing the fatalities by the estimated VMT. Usually, transport risk is computed by reference to the distance traveled by people, while for road traffic risk, only vehicle traveled distance is usually taken into account. In the United States, the unit is used as an aggregate in yearly federal publications, while its usage is more sporadic in other countries. For instance, it appears to compare different kind of roads in some publications as it had been computed on a fiver years period between 1995 and 2000. In the United States, it is computed per 100 million miles traveled, while internationally it is computed in 100 million or 1 billion kilometers traveled. According to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, Office of Traffic Safety
