View the February 20, 2020 seminar recording
Jennifer Symoun
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you to the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is Current FHWA Freight Transportation Research Initiatives.
Before I go any further, I do want to remind you to call into the teleconference for the best audio quality. If you are listening to the audio over the computer and experience any issues, I am unable to fix them as audio quality will vary based on your network connection, computer, speakers, and other factors. Please also keep in mind if you are calling into the teleconference for the audio, you will need to mute your computer speakers or else you will be hearing your audio over the computer as well.
Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to "Everyone" and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. We will also take questions over the phone if time allows and I will provide instructions on how to do so once we get to that point.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar are available for download from the file download box in the lower right corner of your screen. The presentations will also be available online within the next few weeks, along with a recording and a transcript. I will send a link to the recording in the next day or so and will also notify all attendees once all materials are posted online.
Talking Freight seminars are eligible for 1.5 certification maintenance credits for AICP members. In order to obtain credit for today's seminar, you must have logged in with your first and last name or if you are attending with a group of people you must type your first and last name into the chat box.
PDH certificates are also available for Talking Freight seminars. To receive 1.5 PDH credits, you will need to fill out a form. Please see the link in the chat box. Certificates will be emailed one week after the seminar. A seminar agenda has been included in the file download box for those who need to submit an agenda to their licensing agency.
Finally, I encourage everyone to please also download the evaluation form from the file share box and submit this form to me after you have filled it out.
Today we'll have two presenters from the FHWA Office of Freight Management and Operations – Jeff Purdy and Chandra Bondzie. Jeff and Chandra will each give two presentations.
Jeff Purdy has worked on a wide variety of transportation, land use and environmental planning projects at the Federal, state, and local level. He currently works in the Federal Highway Administration Office of Freight Management and Operations in Washington, DC. Jeff's responsibilities include freight performance measures, freight highway operations and bottlenecks, freight data, truck parking, and connected/autonomous vehicles.
Prior to moving to FHWA Headquarters, he served as the Technical Services Team Leader and Transportation Planner for the FHWA Wyoming Division, overseeing statewide and metropolitan transportation planning, the State Transportation Improvement Program, freight planning, air quality, right-of-way, and research. Before joining FHWA, Jeff worked for a community and transportation planning consulting firm in Michigan.
Chandra Bondzie is a Transportation Specialist for the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Freight Management and Operations. She is currently on detail to the Office of the Secretary for the National Freight Strategic Plan effort. She previously worked as a Planner in the Federal Highway Administration Louisiana Division office and as a Freight Planner in Texas.
I'm now going to turn it over to Jeff to begin.
Jeff Purdy
Thank you, Jennifer.
What I wanted to talk about this afternoon are some of the tools that we have for freight performance measures and monitoring transportation performance management. I'm going to talk about some of the freight performance measures that we have, such as the travel time or reliability, tools that we have for identifying freight bottlenecks, and ways that these tools can be used for monitoring the performance of the transportation system moving forward.
In terms of transportation performance management, there's a range of areas that we look at with freight transportation. These mirror the major transportation performance management areas that we have for the overall transportation program as spelled out under Map 21.
Obviously, safety is the number one priority for everyone involved in transportation. And when we specifically look at the freight industry, obviously, the freight industry is concerned about safety from the standpoint of minimizing injuries and fatalities, but also the impact that unsafe transportation could have on freight movement. So, safety is a top priority for everyone, including the freight industry.
But we also have a number of performance measures that deal with maintenance and preservation of transportation infrastructure, looking at bridges and pavements. These are also a major area of concern for freight transportation. Having bridges in good condition, and minimizing constraints in terms of load-posted bridges or bridges with low clearances that could limit freight movement is a major area of concern for the freight industry. The quality of pavement is another major factor, in terms of having good ride quality for trucks to be able to minimize any damage to trucks or to the loads they are carrying.
An area we focus in on a lot with freight transportation is mobility and reliability. There's the MAP 21 Performance Measure for Truck Travel Time Reliability. There's also a number of other indices for travel time index, planning index, and buffer index, that measures how much additional time needs to be added to a trip in order to ensure on-time delivery. For the freight industry, one of their top goals is to maintain or be able to provide on-time delivery for freight transportation. So, I'm going to talk a little more about this area of mobility and reliability.
You may have seen this pie chart here before. It looks at the different aspects of mobility and reliability. Reliability and travel times can be impacted by both recurring congestion and non-recurring congestion.
When you look at the total delay that we experience on the highway system, slightly more than half of that delay is caused by what we call non-recurring congestion. That could be special events, work zones, weather, or other types of incidents on the roadway that are impacting movement. These can cause particular disruptions to freight movement because of the unpredictability of that nonrecurring congestion. It requires the freight and trucking industry to add additional buffer to their travel times to be able to ensure on-time delivery. A lot of them target a 95% on-time delivery, so the need to add an extra cushion or buffer in order to be able to guarantee that. So, our performance measure for travel time reliability focuses in on that reliability aspect or talking about ways of managing that non-recurring congestion.
We also talk a lot about freight bottlenecks; and that's the other side of the pie chart here. Looking at recurring congestions and ways that we can address locations where we have capacity problems.
One of the tools FHWA has made available to states and MPOs for the performance management is the NPMRDS, the National Performance Management Research Data Set. This provides average travel times for both passenger vehicles and trucks. It can be used for not only for MAP 21 performance measures, truck travel time reliability as well as level of travel time reliability on the NHS, but also a number of other measures that states and MPOs could be looking at and using the data for.
There's also a number of tools on their that you can use in terms of being able to drill down and look at specific corridors and identify locations where you have bottlenecks and identifying improvements that need to be made, or corridors that have poor reliability and looking at ways of managing those corridors to try to improve their reliability.
But it also provides a tool to be able to go back and look over time, as projects have been implemented along a specific corridor, to see if mobility along the corridor and the reliability along that corridor has improved. I mentioned we have for the National Performance Measure for freight is the truck travel time reliability, that looks at the 95th percentile relative to the 50th percentile for different time periods during the day. That, again, is designed to try to maintain a level of reliability in a system so that the freight movement can minimize the amount of additional buffer they need to add to the trips to be able to ensure on-time delivery.
This map shows the overall 2017 Truck Travel Time Reliability on the interstate. Looking at the levels of reliability on this map, they range anywhere from 1.1 in mostly rural areas to the highest point with a location that has a truck travel time reliability of 16, so that's a pretty high level of unreliability at that particular location.
Overall, the average truck travel time reliability on the entire interstate system averages out to 1.36. For urban areas, the average truck travel time reliability is 1.74. And for rural interstates, the average truck travel time reliability is 1.17. So, we see the unreliable travel tends to be more in urban areas.
But if you look at this map, particularly some of the western mountain states, you can see red dots along the Interstate. These may be locations such as mountain passes that experience frequent winter weather that impacts mobility, potentially mountain passes that might even close during blizzards during the winter. So, there are areas along rural stretches of interstate that do have reliability issues.
Looking at 2 years of data, we saw that between 2017 and 2018, the overall truck travel reliability went from 1.36 in 2017 to 1.38 in 2018; just a little bit less than 2% decline in reliability nationwide.
Now, the other area we look at, that other side of that pie chart that I showed earlier, is the recurring congestion or the freight bottlenecks. We divide freight bottlenecks into two general categories when we are looking at freight. One is travel speed based delays, recurring congestion that causes delays, not only for freight for all passenger vehicles. Second there is also what we call truck-specific or truck-based delays. These may be constraints on the infrastructure that specifically impact trucks; things such as bridges with restrictions to heavier trucks, or bridges or tunnels that have clearance restrictions that require trucks to detour. The delay these cause for freight is requiring them to take longer routes in order to avoid these bridges or tunnels or other locations where they cannot travel. So, that causes increased delay and increased cost for the freight industry.
States, as part of the Performance Management Program, are looking at freight bottlenecks, not only with the Performance Management Program, but also the State Freight Plans. We have a variety of measures states we are using to look at bottlenecks.
In column one is total delay per mile, where you look at the amount of delay that is caused by the congestion along the corridor multiplied by the volume of trucks traveling along there to get some sort of delay per mile number for the overall system. But there's other things you can look at in terms of the frequency of congestion, the duration of congestion, how long bottlenecks are present, and other types of travel time indexes you can look at, in addition to truck travel time reliability along specific locations.
One of the things you can use to look at different measures for freight bottlenecks is the NPMRDS travel time data. What we have right here is a particular congestion scan for I-95 in Maryland, and it shows some of the locations in the darker red and orange colors where we have slower moving traffic. You can see, over on the left-hand side during the a.m. peak on the south bound for I-95 coming into Baltimore, there's a bottleneck that's recurring during the a.m. peak. You can also see the mirror image of that on the right-hand side during the p.m. peak for northbound I-95. You can also see some of the delay that's caused by toll plazas and the tunnel along this particular stretch of roadway. This is a really valuable tool in terms of looking at congestion and locations of potential bottlenecks.
We are using the NPMRDS data set at the national level to look at the overall interstate system and identify locations where we see significant bottlenecks. We're looking at locations where we've got a lot of truck hours of delay along the interstate system to be able to identify nationally significant bottlenecks that we can track at the national level.
In addition to using this data to be able to identify locations where you have bottlenecks or other operational issues that are creating reliability problems, the travel time data can be used for a number of strategies moving forward in terms of improving the efficiency and reliability of freight movement. You can use these and other tools for looking at transportation system management and operations - ways to improve the flow of traffic responding to incidents and managing weather, special events, or roadwork to try to improve the efficiency and reliability of the transportation system.
And then, looking at locations where we can target improvements to address particular bottleneck locations, again to improve the mobility that we have on the system. And there are a number of the things we can look at in terms of strategies moving forward to improve the operation of the system, both in terms of reliability and mobility.
With that, here's my contact information and I will turn it over to Chandra who's going to be talking about the more tools we have at Federal Highways.
Chandra Bondzie
Thanks, Jeff. This is Chandra with Federal Highways, and I'm going to take you through our beta testing tool, the Freight Fluidity tool. Where we envision the fluidity information is somewhere between the performance data in some of the more higher-level economic data. So, how much freight costs and where it's moving, but combined with a little bit of performance information from the user's or the shipper's perspective; and exploring some different data sources that we haven't had or used before. So, this particular tool focuses on travel time reliability to the industry and across supply chains; transportation costs, but cost to the shipper. So, this is a new way to look at cost. So, not the cost to the economy for somebody to sit in traffic, but rather the actual cost of a supply chain move to the shipper. That is something I will discuss a little bit more. And then on the highway side, we have highway rail, intermodal carload, and water, integrated into this particular tool. So, highway is a part of the tool, but it's a supply chain perspective and we pulled in data from multiple modes.
Now, in order to establish patterns of movement, we went to 30 major U.S. companies across a broad spectrum of industry sectors, commodities, and modes. We drilled down into two test locations, one in New York/New Jersey and Chicago, and picked up some more regionally focused information to sort of trial that out. So, really, in the interviews of these companies we did not ask them what exactly your business practices or exactly how much they are moving, but we focused on what are their critical supply chain patterns of movement. And then we took those patterns and we pressed on some of that existing information, whether it was from NPMRDS or from the waterways data, to get a supply chain performance look as a trial to see what that would look like. So, for the customer prices, the rail and truck intermodal price data was purchased from a commercial aggregator. And the rail carload price data was estimated by our consulting from the STB Waybill information. And the water data that we had from the US Army Corps of Engineers, their Automatic Identification System, with detailed analysis from BTS at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles. The rail carload and intermodal travel time data was also purchased and not all routes were available. For our truck data, we used the existing NPMRDS. Given the needs of the data, we went with dual approach tableau as the basis to combine and analyze the data and visualize, but with the capability to produce new GIS files that we could then easily shuttle into other tools as said from this visualization from tableau.
Here is a snapshot luck at the entire geography coverage here. Across all of the modes, air, marine, rail carload, rail modal, and truck for a total of 417 mapped moves. Now, as a major limitation of course in this trial run, these are specific to 30 industries. So, even more particularly, 30 companies. That's important to note, because we rolled it up into a high-level descriptor, so that if you're looking at a move it might be agricultural meats. When you click on that and you look at that move across modes, that is only representative of one company, not all of the meats in the agricultural business in the country, but rather one. So, that is at the very beginning a strong limitation, but really, this is our start and trial run on whether this particular methodology would work.
And this is the map by industry coverage, broken into agriculture, manufacturing, mining processing, retail transportation, and logistics. Here's some of our system-level analysis, pulling up some different dashboards and tableau for travel time, unreliability, and price by path, mode, and industry cluster. We can show across quarter with different changes, we can filter by the mode, the industry, or the geography. An important descriptive aspect here I want to note is that, if you are a particular state and you are interested in impacts beyond your borders to the regular cost of doing business, this is sort of a place to look for that indicator. So, if you are Illinois, you can look out and see that while you can capture the activity within your borders, this is a good way to imagine the impactfullness of things that are happening in California and how that connects. So, this breaks this home-improvement example into five stages, from the port to a retail outlet, with alternate rail routes. Then it describes the cost, again the cost to shipper. And this we obtained through a new data source for us, from Chainalytics, which is a benchmarking group. So, we took that benchmark information and mapped it onto these specific flows, these supply-chain patterns. That information, again, is not cost to the consumer or the citizen for sitting in traffic due to congestion, but rather the cost to the shipper to make that supply-chain move.
Here is that statewide analysis that you could imagine from a tool such as this. So, Missouri has truck, rail intermodal, rail carload, and water flows. These are inbound, outbound, and through moves, and this is just across 30 companies. And it provides an ability to track these multistate performance metrics for this limited sample. This provides an opportunity in the methodology, not just this tool, but rather it's a technique that we will document and make available so that other people can build their own, and then maybe Missouri wants to build one that has 100 Missouri-specific flows. But rather, we took that larger for the first time out, national scale. You can see we've labeled some of these mining and manufacturing, what's coming in, and these particular flows.
On our other local applications, we did two vetting workshops, one in New York/New Jersey area and one in Chicago, to take a look at how this tool might have impact and also how to make it a little bit better at this stage and what we might look to in the future. So, we have a lot of statistical uses as part of their public agency toolbox, we had a lot of questions from their programmers and travel demand modelers with a lot of really innovative ideas on looking at critical industries and last-mile activity, as well as other freight transportation issues.
So, there are still some next steps here. We are going to launch into some 2020 web-based delivery of both the tool and a user guide, which communicates more clearly the methodology and the steps behind what we have employed so that other people can use that technique. We are also going to continue some outreach to some State DPTs and MPOs to create an awareness of the tools and the methodology. We have presented at TRB and now this wonderful talking freight opportunity, as well as others in the future. And then, we are looking to improve the tool; add additional quarters are industry sectors or applications as interest grows in this particular tool. All right, that's me, and I think Jeff is up now.
Jeff Purdy
Thank you, Chandra. What I wanted to talk about with the truck parking is some of the work we are doing through the Jason's Law Survey to provide updated truck parking information, as well as talk about some of the technology that states are using to provide some really detailed information on truck parking and truck parking information systems, as well as some of the private truck parking data that is available out there that states are taking advantage of. With truck parking there are 4 key focus areas that we look at. One is the parking capacity and looking at creative ways of trying to maximize and expand the available capacity that's out there. Looking at technology and data to understand parking demand and maximize utilization of the parking that's currently available. Innovative tools for funding and financing truck parking through public and private partnerships. And then looking at state, regional, and local government coordination and planning for truck parking.
As I mentioned, Federal Highways is completing the Jason's Law Survey in 2019. We conducted a survey of state D.O.T.'s, state commercial motor vehicle safety personnel, companies and truck drivers involved in the trucking industry, truck stop owners and operators, as well as ports that are major origins and destinations for truck movements. And we've developed an updated inventory nationwide of truck parking and compared that to the previous data was collected in 2014. And this information will be available in the very near future, the report is currently going through final clearance. Then looking at what some of the states have been doing with technology and data. I mentioned that we've got truck parking information systems that are being used to disseminate real-time parking availability to truck drivers, either through roadside signage or smart phone applications. This is providing a lot of opportunities in terms of being able to inform truck drivers of where truck parking is available, but also to be able to collect data at the state level to be able to analyze the usage of truck parking.
Now, these truck parking information systems, this is sort of the general makeup that you have. Number one is this sensing technology that's being used to collect the data at the rest area or truck stop, the data processing that is done at your TMC to be able to process the data, and how that information is disseminated to the truck drivers. In terms of the sensing technology, there's a variety of technology that's being used. We have the in-ground sensors, such as the magnetometer that is shown in this photograph, but other types of devices that can be used to detect the parking at specific parking locations. There is also other technology that provides more information in terms of the areawide truck parking. They could be video technology that looks at the overall rest area and able to recognize trucks and inventory trucks that way, and there's also sensors at the entrance and exit to the rest area that can be used to count trucks as they are entering and exiting the rest area to get a count. Each of these different technologies has pros and cons in terms of their accuracy and coverage. And some states are even looking at implementing a combination of multiple technologies at rest areas to be able to get more complete coverage. And then, in terms of the information dissemination, a lot of states are making the state available on their 511 websites, they are making the data available for third-party smart phone applications that the truck drivers frequently use, and then they are also broadcasting the information on roadside dynamic message signs. And some states are also using the data to develop predictive algorithms where they can look at historic use of an occupancy of truck parking by time of day, day of the week, month of the year, and come up with predictive algorithms so that they can make predictions on what time the truck parking will be full at a particular location. And the hope is to eventually make this available for truck drivers so that they can better plan their parking locations as part of their route.
Another important area we are focusing in on is the importance of state, regional, and local government coordination in truck parking. Many states are including truck parking in their State Freight Plans. Some states have actually developed their own standalone truck parking plans. We are also beginning to see a number of MPO's looking at the issue of truck parking as part of their Regional Transportation Plans. And obviously, having involvement from the freight industry is really key in terms of getting input on what the demands and needs are for truck parking. But in addition to looking at the state or MPO level, it's also really vital to be looking at truck parking at the local level. Because, really, truck parking like a lot of transportation issues, truck parking is heavily related to land usage. If you have a community or you have a lot of industry, a lot of businesses, you are going to have trucks going to and from your community and so you need to start considering truck parking as part of the local development plans, looking at things such as incorporating truck parking as part of industrial sites. We've got some local communities that are looking at including truck parking requirements as part of their local zoning for industrial areas. And then we also have research that's being done that's looking at truck trip generation so that we can better understand truck traffic in terms of traffic impact studies that are being done for local developments, and then to also be able to quantify the amount of parking that's going to be needed to be able to support the trucks that are going to and from that particular land-use.
This is just a partial list right here of some of the state and regional truck parking plans that have been done, and there are many more since this slide was prepared; many more states and MPO's that have prepared truck parking plans. But I wanted to show one example that is a unique application of data. The Arizona D.O.T. did a truck parking plan. It's been a year or two now since it was completed, but they were able to use truck probe data acquired on that data to be able to look at truck parking locations in terms of locations where there was demand for truck parking. And so, they went through a process of, number one, doing an inventory of the parking that was available around the state. And then they were able to be able to use some of the truck probe data to be able to look at the density of truck parking. This was used in combination with a private app that truck drivers used to be able to find available truck parking. So, they were able to use this crowd-sourced data for truck parking to be able to map the density of truck parking locations. Using this crowd-sourced data, they were able to look at individual rest areas and the time of day, the amount of parking by time of day, and the duration of the parking at the rest area. And then they were able to use the truck probe data to be able to map out the truck parking at specific locations. And this example here shows a rest area, and all of the green dots are trucks that are parked within the rest area, but all of the red dots are trucks that are parked along the shoulders during times when the rest area is full. So, you can see there's a demand for truck parking at this particular location. Obviously, it far exceeds the capacity that is available. So, these are some examples of using some probe data or crowd sourced data from private apps to be able to better understand the truck parking situation as part of the state truck parking plan.
Here again is my contact information and web link to our website, where we have information on truck parking. And with that, I will turn it back over to Chandra.
Chandra Bondzie
Thanks, Jeff. So, we will launch into the National Highway Freight Network tool. This one is pretty straightforward, simply providing an ArcGIS online web tool application for the visualization of the components of the National Highway Freight Network. We don't have one right now, we have an Excel table, as well as the GIS files for folks online. So, this application was allowed to do that visualization, and importantly, folks who do not have access to the GIS information but would prefer a visualization can have access through this tool.
We did run into some data conflation challenges with some of the component information as a portion of the National Highway Freight Network. The Primary Highway Freight System is based on earlier data. And then, we are also updating as we go along with interstate data from HPMS, and the critical urban and critical rural freight corridors as they are sent to us by states in a variety of formats. We then piece those together into the network for a visualization. Because we are aligning with the HPMS submittal, we are pulling in IRI condition data.
The key features of this is it's going to be updated yearly with the IRI and mileage included, so you will be able to download that data set from the tool and to drill down really deeply to see the critical urban and critical rural components. At a national scale those are not visible, but as you begin to drill down to state urban and regional level, you begin to see those critical urban and critical rural corridors. So, this can provide access for a whole host of folks to download. It also provides some internal analysis capabilities for us as well going forward. We did build it in the ArcGIS online suite and the data processing Arc map in ArcGIS Pro. This also provides a look and feel very much like Google maps that people are very familiar with, and it's super easy to customize and change up. So, some upcoming activities are always QAQC on the data, as well as more of the analytical capabilities, building on and connecting and growing that in the future. And then, fall into data maintenance of course. As we know, highways are part of a living and growing network, every year some interstate's built and some interstate comes down. We get new input rolling in from states in a variety of formats on critical urban and critical rural submittals, as well as new HPMS information every year.
This is my contact information. This website right now is closed, we are going to the IT security review that we have internal, and we look to make our debut coming into the late spring on our capacity building site, which will also, I believe, be debuted in the late spring, early summer time frame.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you both of you, we have now gone through all of the presentations. We are going to go ahead and start going through the questions that have been typed in, and we have plenty of time remaining so please continue typing and questions if you have them. Jeff, we are going to start with you. There are quite a few questions for your first presentation. The first question is, is that 16 TTTR located near the George Washington bridge by any chance?
Jeff Purdy
No, it isn't. It's actually on I-90 in Washington state. However, when I looked at that location in the following years data, the number dropped pretty significantly. So, I haven't really looked into detail at that location, but something might have been going on in terms of roadwork or something like that, maybe a major project that was impacting that number, because with the second year of data, that number went way down. But, actually, the George Washington Bridge in between New Jersey and New York is obviously a significant freight bottleneck on the interstate system.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you. The next question for you, what is the difference between bottleneck and reliability?
Jeff Purdy
Well, the bottleneck is probably more related to recurring congestion, a location where you have capacity constraints, where the traffic levels are more on a recurring basis where it creates delay. Versus, the reliability may look at things that are nonrecurring congestion, whether roadwork, special events, things that cause a poor reliability on a location. You could have a rural location that experiences frequent severe weather during the winter, and perhaps that section of road is subject to closures creating reliability problems, but when you don't have a weather event the capacity along that roadway is fine. We do see a lot of locations that are heavily congested also having reliability problems in major urban areas where you've got high-volume, heavily congested roadways when an incident occurs such as a crash, that has a significant impact on that facility. So, you can see bottleneck locations or congested corridors also having reliability problems.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. The next question for you, what role should slow speeds and high V/C ratios have in determining bottleneck locations?
Jeff Purdy
Those are a couple of commonly used measures for identifying bottlenecks, and probably the measure that we use the most is related, again, to the slow speeds. We look at truck hours of delay per mile, and basically, we use the NPMRDS data and we look at determining a reference speed. It could be a free-flow speed during off-peak periods, or you could use the posted speed, but then also look at your average travel times, particularly during peak hours, to see how much additional travel time is required during congested periods. You can use that to be able to calculate the delay per mile for that section of roadway and then multiplying that by the truck volumes that are moving along that highway you can come up with an estimate of the annual truck hours of delay. We like to normalize it by roadway lengths so that you can compare one location to another. But there are a number of measures that can be used; the truck hours of delay, looking at volume to capacity ratio, you can look at some other types of travel time indexes, such as looking at a travel time index that compares peak hour travel times to off-peak hour travel times. You can also look at things such as the extent of congestion, in other words, the length of the queue of the backup that you have at that bottleneck to understand the scope of it. You can also look at things such as duration. Is it a bottleneck that occurs one hour a day, or is it something that lasts much longer and is much more extensive of a bottleneck?
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you. Is it possible to provide a cost per hour of delay?
Jeff Purdy
Yes. What you could do is you could, number one, calculate the truck hours of delay that you have at a location, and then multiply that by the cost per hour for a truck. And I believe I saw Dan Murray entered their latest number which I believe is $71 per hour. So, that's looking at the cost for the driver, as well as the cost of wasted fuel of being in congestion.
Jennifer Symoun
All right. And another question for you is NPMRDS data available for roads other than interstates?
Jeff Purdy
Yes, the NPMRDS data is available for the entire NHS. So that would be the interstate as well as the NHS roadways off the interstate.
Jennifer Symoun
All right. And next question, what was the name of the national level data set that you used to create the congestion map in the CD area?
Jeff Purdy
That map was created based upon the NPMRDS data.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you. Let's see, Chandra, we have questions for you, mostly relating to how and where you can get the data. I know you typed some responses for that, but maybe if you could just go over everything again about how you can download the data from your second presentation?
Chandra Bondzie
Sure. So, the National Highway Freight Network tool itself is under review, but we do have a GIS shape file up for download. And you can also email me at any time for the latest GIS file for upload of that. We are planning in the short-term to put up an Excel table as well, that is updated with critical urban and critical rural freight corridors submissions and links for folks to take a look at. But really, the web tool will provide any of the visualization efforts as to difference in scale between an interstate highway and maybe a mile long critical urban or critical rural, it doesn't behoove itself to easily put it on a map, so, we figured the tool where you can zoom in and zoom out is going to be your best option for that. On the fluidity tool, that one is still in review; it looks like we will probably have something available there. A couple of components of the tool itself so you can look at it, but more importantly, a user guide, not just the report, that steps you through the methodology so that other people can pick it up if they would like to use local data sources or regional data sources, and focus on supply-chain patterns from industries that are part of their State Freight Advisory Committee or others for a more local projects. We realize that's an important component and we encourage people to do that from a tech transfer standpoint. Again, that's for both of those tools, we are looking early summer, late spring for those websites. But, of course, if you have any questions, or you need any more detailed information, just reach out to me at any time.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you. I think that got through all of the questions asking about the tools, but if we did not get to someone's question, please feel free to remind me and we can go back to it. Let's see, Jeff, a question for you. Could you please be more specific on which better data and models do you envision moving forward?
Jeff Purdy
I think it's probably related to the last slide in the first presentation. What I was talking about there was using some of the performance data that we have in terms of the probe data and being able to analyze travel times in congestion, is using that data over time to be able to see where we have trends, but also to look at specific corridors and see how they change over time in response to either projects or TSMO efforts that are implemented along the corridor. In other words, let's say you've got a congested interstate corridor that you want to implement ramp metering. So, you could look at before and after speeds along that corridor to be able to assess the effectiveness of ramp metering along that corridor. Maybe you've got a location where you want to do something different in terms of managing work zones to try to maintain a certain level of mobility along the corridor while work is going on, you could be able to use that data to look back and see how effective those practices were. Or if you've got a bottleneck location where improvements are made, in terms of adding additional capacity or making improvements to an interchange or something, that you could go back over time and look at how travel times through that segment improved over time.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you. Let's see, another question. What is the approximate cost of maintaining and updating the data per mile?
Jeff Purdy
We don't really have a cost for that. I'm not really clear what the question is. The NMPRDS data is acquired by Federal Highways and made available to states and MPOs free of charge.
Jennifer Symoun
Okay. If you'd like to type in a question to further clarify that we can get back to that.
I think that's all the questions that have been typed in. We still have time left, so let's see if anybody wants to ask a question over the phone. If you do want to ask a question over the phone, you can press star five and I will open up your phone line. Again, that's star five if you would like to ask a question. And also feel free to continue typing in questions if you would like to.
I don't see any questions coming in over the phone. It looks like we might have a question coming in, so we will wait a second for that to see if anybody else is typing a question in here. It looks like we might have a few questions coming in. While we are ready for those questions, I do want to remind everybody that if you do want to obtain 1.5 PDH credits for today's seminar, please fill out the form, the link is showing on the slide on your screen and certificates will be emailed out next Thursday. For AICP CM credits you can visit the website to log your credits there. I will be sending out a link in the next day or so with the recording of today's webinar. And then within the next few weeks we will send out a link to the transcript and all presentations. You will also be able to download the presentations on the recording.
Let's see, we have a question here, it's not just trucks that are delayed, what about all the people in passenger cars on their way to work. What is their time worth?
Jeff Purdy
Yes, that is something else that we look at that we have in addition to the truck travel time reliability that specifically looks at freight. We also have a level of travel time reliability that looks at the person miles of delay, specifically in passenger vehicles. And then, we have another measure that looks at the congestion costs in terms of the peak hour excessive delay. And that, again, is based on person-hours of delay.
Jennifer Symoun
All right. And I do not see any other questions coming at this point. We will wait another minute. Let's see, looks like we might have another question coming in, so we will wait a second for that. All right, I do not see any other questions coming in.
Let's see here. I think we will go ahead and end a bit early for today since there are no other questions. Thank you both of you for your presentations, and thanks to everybody for attending today's seminar. As I mentioned, I will be sending out a link to the recording of today's webinar within the next day or so. The March Talking Freight Seminar is not yet available for registration but once it is I will send a notice to the Freight Planning LISTSERV. This is the primary means of sharing information about upcoming seminars, so if you have not already joined it, I encourage you to do so. The link at which you can do so is showing on your screen. With that, we will go ahead and end for today. Thank you very much and enjoy the rest of your day.
