MILESTONES IN THE PROCESS OF SURVEY PREPARATION FOR THE LOGISTICS SECTOR: CASE STUDY FOR ISTANBUL, TURKEY
3. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH This paper summarized the purpose, scope, methodology, and stages of the study of logistics and
b. Type and size of vehicle, and freight/goods type 5. Capacity related to the sector
a. Quality of the business b. Satisfaction of customers
6. Current employment and future personnel needs a. By education, profession and experience 7. Financial Situation during the last year
a. Income and expenditures b. Benefit/Cost ratio
2.3.4. Traffic and Truck Surveys
After the logistics sector (establishment) surveys were completed, vehicle classification and truck surveys were conducted. Traffic and truck surveys were conducted over a smaller sample than the establishment surveys were. The sample size for traffic and truck surveys is about 10 percent of the sector surveys.
2.4. Difficulties Observed During the Study
Some difficulties were observed during the study because the logistics sector is very huge and extensive. Though the efficiency of the sector is not truly within the scope of this study, some questions to disclose the time of duration of trucks for loading and/or unloading within each land use are designed and this design is failed, for example, at wholesale markets because some trucks spent more than 24 hours, even 2-3 days at such land uses. These cases greatly increased standard deviations of the asked variables. However, by this question though it is aimed to disclose the time spent for the operations of loading and unloading and to investigate reasons of such inefficient operations, such unusual cases distorted the averages of the asked variables. By analyzing the reasons of inefficient operations, the logistics system will be commented on in more details and necessary precautions will be taken for the optimization of the system. Though possible answers for the question asked are expected to be a couple of hours, the answers to it received at the wholesale markets are 2-3 days.
2.5. Solutions for Successful Designs
First of all, type of data needed for the study must be determined. Based on the type of data required, volume of data must be decided. Secondly, time, personnel and cost must be projected for such type and volume of data. Types of equipment and human resources required to perform data collection dictates the total cost of the study. Sometimes, automated data collection methods such as loop or radar detectors hinder details of trip and vehicle classification data. For this reason, manual data collection methods might be chosen. If the study is conducted by the regional planning agency, such as the metropolitan municipality’s transport department as in this study, other local as well as central government agencies cooperate easily to make the study successful as desired.
For the success of the surveys, level of detail must not exceed beyond the scope of the study. This increases the cost and makes the interviews real burden on the shoulder of interviewees and they may give up answering the questionnaires as long and complex questions keep coming
3. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH
logistics plans are considered to be conducted. This study will be a good example for the same studies in the future.
As a recommendation for future research, we strongly suggest electronic vehicle counting by the analyses of video images. In this study, we used the video images and visually extracted data by trained personnel in order to control manual traffic counting. Secondly, we opted out recording plate number of the vehicles during counting since it increased the time and human resources incredibly, well beyond existing resources of the study. However, via video imaging methods, which are currently under development by a company of the Istanbul’s municipality, it is possible to track vehicles entering the boundaries of the land uses that are the subject of the study but not directly related to this location can be excluded from the analysis. Also, by tracking the vehicles which are related to these locations studied, it can be possible to determine how long they occupied the parking locations within the land uses.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Authors acknowledge Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, General Directorate of Transportation, Department of Transportation Planning by creating the opportunity for the authors to work on the project of Trip Generation Handbook and Logistics Study and let them present their experiences at the International Conference on Prospects for Research in Transport and Logistics on a Regional-Global Perspective, Feb., 12-14, 2009, Istanbul, Turkey. In addition, several specialists and academicians contributed greatly to the development of survey questionnaires named in this paper. Authors would like to acknowledge their contributions and cite their names here: Dr. Aykut Toros (professor of emeritus and project leader of the Research group in IMP), Dr. Gungor Evren (professor of emeritus of transportation at ITU), Ihsan Hadi Karadeniz (Vice Manager, Department of Transportation Planning, IBB), Ahmet Kocaslan (chief researcher of the Research group in IMP).
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