Characterization of Freight Trip from Textile Powerloom Units – A Case Study of Surat, India

Abstract Surat, a city located in western part of India is known for its textile industries. The city produces 40% of the total man-made fabric production in the country. There are close to 700,000 weaving machines producing approximately 30 million meters of raw fabric every day. Almost 650,000 of these weaving machines are powerlooms or shuttled looms. Powerlooms are widely used because they are cheaper, needs lesser space and offers variety of weaving options. A large variety of raw fabric is produced based on its utility which is sent for its further processing works to the processing units. A textile market area located on the ring road is a hub for trading of various textile goods. A large number of goods movement trips occur from various powerloom units to the market and other processing units in the city. With 25000 weaving units located in different parts of the urban area, 320 processing units and 140 wholesale trading market complexes, the internal or intra-city textile goods movement becomes very complex. In this study freight trip generation characteristics of powerloom industry is studied here and a model is developed to forecast the number of freight trips from various powerloom units clusters so as to estimate the overall flow of freight vehicles at the network level