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 Freight and Land Use. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded.
Today we'll have four presentations, given by Daniel Rodriguez and Marc Howlett, of the Carolina Transportation Program & Department of City and Regional Planning, UNC- Chapel Hill; Anne Strauss-Wieder of A. Strauss-Wieder, Inc.; Jim Dwyer of the Maryland Port Administration: and Caroline Mays of the Atlanta Regional Council.
Dr. Rodriguez is the Director of the Carolina Transportation Program and associate professor in City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the connection between transportation systems and land development. His research has been funded by the foundations, federal, state and local agencies. He is the author of more than 40-peer reviewed publications in the transportation area and a co-author of the book Urban Land Use Planning. Dr. Rodríguez got his PhD from University of Michigan in Arbor and Masters of Science in Transportation from MIT.
Marc Howlett is a doctoral student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC -Chapel Hill. His research interests focus on issues in freight transportation planning. Mr. Howlett received a Master of Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia.
Anne Strauss-Wieder is the principal and founder of the Westfield, NJ firm bearing her name. With 30 years of experience, she is an expert in distribution and logistics and recognized for her work in industry analysis, combining economic development with transportation investment, private sector involvement, economic impact studies, and strategy development. She authored a publication on best practices for making freight facilities "better neighbors" for the Transportation Research Board (NCHRP Synthesis 320) and coauthored a paper for the Brookings Institution on Principles for Establishing a US Public Freight Agenda. Among her current projects, she developed the Freight Academy immersion training program for the I-95 Corridor Coalition, is the Deputy Project Manager for a Rail Crossing Assessment Study in New Jersey and analyzing the applicability of the freight village concept to the New York Metropolitan Region. She has a BA and MA in Regional Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Jim Dwyer joined the Maryland Port Administration's (MPA) as the Deputy Director for Planning in August 1997. Mr. Dwyer's current responsibilities with the MPA include oversight of the Planning Department, Facility Development Plan, the Capital Program, and the MPA's Quality Programs. He, and his staff facilitate quality initiatives, perform cargo forecasts and analysis, terminal capacity, economic impact studies, justify capital projects, update the Strategic Plan and MPA's performance measures, and other special studies. Mr. Dwyer is the only person in the MPA to hold a Master's license in the U. S. Merchant Marine for vessels up to 1,600 tons.
Caroline Mays has over 10 years of professional transportation planning experience. She is currently a Principal Transportation Planner in the Transportation Planning Division of the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) the MPO for the Atlanta Region. In this position, Ms. Mays manages the Freight Planning Program and the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) Planning Program. Specific freight responsibilities include overseeing and coordinating work efforts of the Regional Freight Mobility Advisory Council. Ms. Mays was instrumental in the initiation and creation of the Freight Mobility Advisory Council to address freight transportation needs in the regional transportation planning process. Most recently she managed the development of the 1st Regional Freight Mobility Plan for the Atlanta Region (Recipient of the 2008 AMPO National Award for Outstanding Technical Merit in Metropolitan Transportation Planning). Ms. Mays is currently managing the development of the region's 1st comprehensive Regional Strategic Truck Route Master Plan. Ms. Mays received her Bachelors degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Waterloo Canada and a Masters degree of Science in Planning from the University of Toronto Canada.
I'd now like to go over a few logistical details prior to starting the seminar. 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 smaller text box underneath the chat area on the lower right side of your screen. Please make sure you are typing in the thin text box and not the large white area. Please also 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. Once we get through all of the questions that have been typed in, the Operator will give you instructions on how to ask a question over the phone. If you think of a question after the seminar, you can send it to the presenters directly, or I encourage you to use the Freight Planning LISTSERV. The LISTSERV is an email list and is a great forum for the distribution of information and a place where you can post questions to find out what other subscribers have learned in the area of Freight Planning. If you have not already joined the LISTSERV, the web address at which you can register is provided on the slide on your screen.
Finally, I would like to remind you that this session is being recorded. A file containing the audio and the visual portion of this seminar will be posted to the Talking Freight Web site within the next week. We encourage you to direct others in your office that may have not been able to attend this seminar to access the recorded seminar.
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 week. I will notify all attendees of the availability of the PowerPoints, the recording, and a transcript of this seminar.
We're now going to go ahead and get started. Today's topic, for those of you who just joined us, is Freight and Land Use Our first presentation will be given by Daniel Rodriguez and Marc Howlett, of the Carolina Transportation Program & Department of City and Regional Planning, UNC- Chapel Hill. As a reminder, if you have questions during the presentation please type them into the chat box and they will be answered in the last 30 minutes of the seminar.
Daniel Rodriguez:
Thank you. We are going to cover three main topics: Freight context, top factors affecting the industry and its location choices, and then we will be looking at empirical approaches to exampling impacts.
So from the trucking side, one way of tracking the trucking industry, is the type of industries that they take. The truckload are the trucks you often see out there, the ones that have very little handling while in route. Drivers of these truckloads tend to be paid by the miles and are sensitive to congestion. For the less than truckload shipments, we have shippers who are paid by the hour, so the congestion tends to be passed on to the shipper. You have local and regional truckloads. Some are operating in a range of 4 miles and up to 400 to 600 miles. They tend to compete with the lesser truckload carriers. You will see with the increasing E-commerce, the landing capacities will land more towards the airports, interstates which the bulk is shipped by trucks, and then, of course, in the distribution centers throughout the community.
Looking at the rails, you have 7 big railroads, but you have some other classes as well. There is a high inventory cost or high costs in the value chain. Parts are time sensitive or components are a complex of chain. And then of course you have air travel and the impact of that with the supply chain. Then, of course, you will have the intermodal, these are in airports or further out to the Metro areas.
Broadly said the industry segmentation in the 1980's and legislation created this. The regulation brought this hypertension. It causes high rates and thin margins. This provides consolidation and concentration for the carriers and will impact the carriers in freight.
Freight volumes are steadily increasing and despite the slow downs in the economy, they are continually growing. The anecdotal localized costs versus the general benefit such as urban land-use development patterns are critical components that potentially constrain goods movement. The uses of land with the freight activities are the warehouses, logistic centers, and the operations in the logistics are changing this is becoming more regionally implemented overall. They have come up with land patterns in helping with the constraints of the freight. Given that context, let me now turn the podium here to my colleague Marc who will talk about the industry and its location choices.
Marc Howlett:
Our session today is about metropolitan land use and the impact of freight transportation. I think it is good to keep in mind energy prices and how they have changed over the past decade or two. This is a quote from Keith Harrison who is head of global supply for Proctor and Gamble and he said that their distribution network was created in the 1980s and 1990s when capital spending was fairly high and the price of oil was still much cheaper.
Here are the top factors affecting industry and its impacts on the metropolitan land. Congestion is important in regards to transportation because of the shipments, timed shipments, and then if there is a delay, the delivery of freight is very important. The capacity not keeping up with the total amount and volume is going to a major issue.
Metropolitan land prices and land availability has generally led to a dispersion of freight land uses. Because of the increase in gas prices you may want to stay closer to the markets in terms of the profitablity. Energy prices are also affecting the industry and impacting the metropolitan land and land uses. Some of the other facts that we looked at: Localized burdens with the regional and national benefits. That is common. Factors like noise and other environmental issues as well which impact the transportation of goods. Zoning and compatible use is another localized burden considering the neighborhood. We will talk more about that. And then the proximity links on value chain; significant amount of employment is located within 10 miles of all top and major airports. So your proximity is important to your transportation and land uses.
Also local economic development tools, Rickenbacker Intermodal Terminal, here in Columbus, Ohio opened in 2008. Intermodal facilities are also important, so just having your proximity of the rail highways is, again, very important. And for the last section, I will hand it over to Daniel and he will talk about the modals and the empirical analyses of the freight and land impacts.
Daniel Rodriguez:
This has been fairly an anecdotal. We need to provide direction on the future behaviors and identify policy responses. The first one is metropolitan level models of land use and transportation. The first one is micro-simulation, which I want to talk about first. Urbansim only covers the land development; transportation has not yet been incorporated. They are adding a based model. There is no mention of the freight activities, unfortunately. They tend to be cross-sectional and so they don't change much. The concern is the type of freight and volumes. The type of freight and the location will affect the land uses. We also have spatial input output with discrete choices. These are actually better than a Metro-level application.
So we are left with the empirical analyses of freight and land impacts and models. These are reduced form models. These are used for the type of cell/parcel and conversion of it and why. This is in regards to the proximity, location, and, of course, land.
I would like to give acknowledgments here where we received support received by Dr. Steve Appold and Rich Kuzmyak.
Jennifer Symoun:
Thank you Daniel and Marc and thank you to those of you who posted questions. We'll address your questions at the end of the seminar. We'll now move on to Anne Strauss-Wieder of A. Strauss-Wieder, Inc.
Anne Strauss-Wieder:
Thank you. This presentation will give examples of the freight villages in integrated logistics centers in the United States.
What is a freight village? First of all, it is a complex where goods are shifted from one place to another. There is a modal shift; goods are moved between two or more forms of freight transportation by rail to truck, barge to rail/truck, air and rail/truck. And then you have the economic activity, that is active distribution centers and industrial activities are located adjacent to the modal shift facilities within the village. Freight villages are also known as Integrated Logistics Centers (ILC).
The U.S. freight villages have counterparts of Europe. In the United States freight villages and ILCs have been developed by the private sector. As the definition goes it is a modal shift: Rail to truck transfer. It is also generally a location where large distribution centers serving large metropolitan or multi-state areas and where they are located. Economic activities are largely integrated. There are a couple of ways where the U.S. freight villages have developed: you can build from scratch, add a village – where the industrial and support activities have been added to the freight facilities, you can evolve a village where warehouses evolve into a freight village. And then you have a freight village of a smaller scale: think Hamlet village.
Let's look at freight city. Alliance covers 17,000-acres; it has 140 tenants. It not only has rail and truck access, but it has an airport. Here is the site. There was a need to build a residential community for the workers. Here are the different ranges from Nokia to Laredo.
CenterPoint Intermodal Center was a former military base and Brownfield. When the arsenal closed it caused many job losses. This is a prime location within the Chicago and is the major area of distribution. Wal-Mart has a 3.4 million sq. ft. complex here.
The Mesquite and Intermodal facility in Skyland Business Park has activities adjacent to the site. Here is where you can take the freight use and the turn it into an activity for the local community.
Going back to Texas, the Dallas Logistics Hub - here is the intermodal terminal. There are 6,360 acres being developed on that site.
Raritan Center in New Jersey also was an arsenal site. This center occupies 2,350 acres and runs two facilities with small yards within it. There are hotels, offices located with it, there is a center, and it has 12,000 employees there now onsite.
Pureland is the largest industrial site east of the Mississippi. This site faced some environmental considerations so was developed on green field – needed to develop an industrial part that took into account a lot of the nature in the area and considered a lot of the environmental aspects. It has nature areas, farms, preserves, and people could go fishing if they would like. It now has 8000 employees. It has hotels, offenses and restaurants, and other work sites. When McDonalds came on to site this allowed them to add that to the location and provide amenities.
What makes an ILC or freight village a good neighbor? When you talk about the municipality, will it provide employment for my community, and secondly, it can help mitigate concerns. It can provide services that were not originally there in the community. It can bring doctor's offices, etc. It gives you amenities like the rail cars and it integrates the activities together.
Some green practices that come into place. Purelands provide nature trails and areas. Haines provides transit access. East coast and Halls have refrigerated warehouses and some of the largest solar arrays on structures in the world.
Lastly, I want to discuss the idea of the compact freight village. Can we take several centers and develop one big center. This is formally from the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration and we took it to see if we could incorporate access to other places. This is to determine the ecosites and the ecopreserves. For example nestling the rail yards to buffer the sounds provides a nicer addition to the community.
Freight villages are opportunities. They leverage trade operations to create local economic value. They create shared value supporting businesses and serving the village and the surrounding community. They use primarily private funds to achieve local community development goals. They reuse the Brownfield properties in a productive matter and they encourage the use of freight use.
I will turn it to Jennifer.
Jennifer Symoun:
Thank you Anne. We will now hear from Jim Dwyer of the Maryland Port Administration.
Jim Dwyer:
Thank you. I think my presentation is kind of like a case study. I need to stress that there are private terminal operators operating within the port. Most of these are within the jurisdiction of the city of Baltimore. They have mostly small boats marinas. The Port of Baltimore is 300 years old; it is about 90 years older than Baltimore city. It is the farthest inland of the east coast ports and it was a great advantage up until the 1980s when the trucking and the railroad industries were deregulated. The railroads led the way for terminal development at most ports in the United States. They lost the incentive after WW II. Even further in time, there has been three paradigm shifts in ship designs. First, steam propulsion that allowed them to keep a schedule; and then the steel shipbuilding was much, much larger and that developed the cargoes. And then 50 years ago we had containerized cargo which provided larger and open spaces. The ships could be discharged much quicker, typically 8 hours versus a week or so to ship that amount of cargo off of your hands.
Globalization: Baltimore's international trade continues to grow and domestic waterborne tonnage remains steady. That evolution continues: Many cargo terminals and maritime industries have migrates out of the Inner Harbor. They were operating up and down the east coast as well as east and west across the Chesapeake Bay. I-95 moves along in this direction and goes under a tunnel and pops up on the other side near the coal fields. Now the port of Baltimore is a mix of public and private terminals as I mentioned earlier. We have handled a diverse amount of commodities. The private terminals handle most of the bulks. It handles diverse bulk and general cargoes. Our main source is coal and iron ore, and then the smaller ones are like sugar and other smaller containers. This puts the port in a perspective.
We are a large port, but not the size of Los Angeles. This of course creates jobs. We have 50,000 total jobs depending on the port. A third of those are direct jobs. And the neighboring ports up and down the east coast are competitive for our business because they want the jobs. And the developers within the city are competitive to gobble up waterfront land wherever they can get it. The city can determine the land use. Baltimore city's Inner Harbor has had great success with the commercial retail office spaces and businesses downtown which has created other waterfront development.
Here is Tide Point Office Complex. This is where they use to make Tide laundry detergent. Here is where they are developing Silo Point Condominiums. They are a blue collared working neighbor with the CSX rail yard and CSX railroad community. This is an artists rendering of the Silo Point Condominiums, but the artist's rendition doesn't highlight the rail yard, and I would hate to hear that. This is the Canton Crossing Office/Condominium complex.
In the early 2000, the city realized it could do a better job managing the Planned Unit Developments. You need a critical mass of waterfront business to ensure you have enough tug companies, surveyors, , construction companies, and the like. It was hard to say no to the developers one-on-one. And land use became a constant issue at the industrial and mixed use frontier. We bring jobs and we add value to the products. The developers that want to push the residential and commercial use they try to get the city to focus on giving you more taxes for the same acreage, they are consuming values, desire waterfront, but they can be located inland.
We were very pleased when the city did the right thing in our view and in 2004 they passed the Maritime Industrial Zone Overlay District (MIZOD) and this really helped the private terminals within the port. This helped them obtain capital investments and from developing encroachment. It has to be heavy industrial. Any of the waterfront area that was at least 18-foot of water was with railroad and highway access. Planned units are not allowed for 10 years. Taverns and live entertainment was not allowed. Also office and hotel, commercial uses are not permitted unless as an accessory use. A 10 year extension is not being considered. We are working hard to make this happen. Here are the portions of the city that are on the deepwater that are industrial now and tied up in the maritime industrial zone.
That is pretty much my talk. The evolution continues. Here are a couple of other slides here for a reference. That one didn't come through so good. Okay. Here we go. Jennifer, I am done.
Jennifer Symoun:
Thank you, Jim. Our final presentation will be given by Caroline Mays of the Atlanta Regional Council.
Caroline Mays:
Thank you. Today I will give you an overview of the Atlanta region, key freight and land use challenges, and the mobility plan, land use analysis and recommendations, and then I will come back to the lessons learned and the conclusions in order to create the plan. This is the Atlanta MPO planning boundary. This is as a result of the 2000 consensus. In terms of employment, by 2030, we will have 6 million people employed as compared to today. We will add an additional 1.7 million jobs that is an increase of 66%. This will create 65% of new jobs each year. The result of the increase and the employment that is projected will mean that more people and more businesses will demand and consume more goods and services in our region.
The map here illustrates networks for the inland distribution markets in the United States. It is Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas. Atlanta is one of the three top distributions centers in the United States primarily because Atlanta has excellent infrastructure and a fairly large local market. Atlanta also has excellent interstate access as well as excellent rail access.
This graph pretty much just represents a break down of total freight tonnage from 2005. The key here is to highlight the predominant role that trucks play in our region. A bulk of freight moved our region is buy trucks. As I will talk about later on you will understand the key of what I am trying to express here.
The next couple of maps will show the layout of the land use in our region and it will also give you the view and highlights of the job opportunities in our region. The first map shows the truck terminals versus business location and highway network. The second map shows the distribution of business establishments and highway network. The third map shows the manufacturing sector establishments and highway network. The point here is that manufacturing generates the highest value of the goods among the five major sections in our region making it accountable for our economy. The last map shows the construction sector establishments and highway network. It will correlate with the major systems along the highway system. It generates the highest volume.
These are the key freight/land use issues. The first one is increasing the consideration of freight needs in regional land use and transportation plans. The second challenge is the conflicts among the land uses constraining redevelopment. The third one is emerging land use conflicts. The fourth is the tools to support local and regional planners in zoning and site plan review. The fifth is the methods to better consider the multi-jurisdictional and corridor impacts of freight, and the last one is the increasing demands for modern warehousing and distribution facilities in suburban and exurban areas. Where I was explaining the freight activities in the suburban and urban communities, these are critical here.
In this slide, I want to explain the key issues as to why it is important to coordinate freight and land use. It is really becoming critical to coordinate the planning due to the community impacts, because of lights, noise, air quality, safety, property values, and quality of life, and other impacts. We have the quality like water. And then we have some incompatible issues that are coming from the incompatible languages. The purpose of coordinating freight and land use is correlated with mitigation requirements, expansion constraints, operating hour limits and it plays a primary role in the community and businesses.
In our region, we undertook a major freight mobility plan as I mentioned earlier and we completed that this year. The purpose of that was to help the MPO of land use planning and freight mobility. The language analysis focused on two key areas. One is to coordinate between the land use and the freight planning. And the second is to develop a comprehensive freight strategy. This is fairly comprehensive, the case study methodology for examination, on the freight/land use issues. It conducted site visits, reviewed existing plans and information, examined interactions among land uses, and gained useful opportunities for the land developments.
This slide shows the case studies from the freight and land use developments. These were really chosen carefully to be key within our areas.
The next couple of slides I will highlight some of themes that were accommodating the case studies as well as the key issues where we built in doing the analysis. First, here in this slide, here is the issue of the logistic considerations is not developed in the freight access and design analysis. This is designed for the freight design and track movement. One that is a major issue in our region and several of the case studies actually reveal this. It has significant influx and proximity to intense freight uses. This has resulted in land use conflicts, comparable land uses, adequate buffers of the land uses.
Another key issue brought to bear by the analysis is the challenges of meeting and preserving freight mobility especially in light of the freight facilities moving outside of the urban area. The infrastructure was not really designed to accommodate freight needs. This has been precipitated by roadway congestion and safety concerns in these areas. As I mentioned a lot the facilities, as you see here, are two way-roadways, that were not necessarily designed for freight and some of the turning issues whereby trucks have a difficult time maneuvering to and from the different facilities within the area. The next one brings up the whole issue of Brownfield redevelopment potentially within our region. We have seen the development decline over the past years as the other facilities have moved to the Suburban areas within our region.
In our region we have an abundant amount of trucks. In our region we can generally predict that they will locate in an area with areas that have access to high speed, high capacity network transportations. It was prominent in the analysis and the recommendations that were put forth to address this issue. The next issue in our region is the challenges of coordinating the freight and non-freight land uses. The main issue here is that our region has deal with high uses of overactive planning on the freight uses and the land uses.
This slide here provides an overview of the case studies and findings. They can preserve freight mobility as the region continues to develop. They can coordinate the freight and non-freight land uses and mobility needs. They can ensure adequate segregation and protection of various land-uses. And they can build goods movement and logistics needs into land development and site design. This is an essential part of the growing economy.
Now, the next couple of slides will provide a detailed overview of the presentations. I won't go into all of this, many of you can download this; but I provided this as a point of reference to give the detailed work that went behind this. The highlight of my presentation is the lessons learned and the conclusions of the freight and land use developments.
The next slide, again, you know, highlights some of the key lessons learned as well. Here it is extremely important to understand the language efforts evolving on the freight and non-freight development and to apply the adequate mitigation strategies, design existing and future transportation corridors to accommodate freight needs for users and developments.
Thank you that concludes my presentation. I will turn it over to Jennifer.
Jennifer Symoun:
I encourage you all to take a look at the website here and view their plan.
I'd now like to start off the Q&A session with the questions posted online. Once we get through those questions, if time allows I'll open up the phone lines for questions.
While I go through the questions, I am going to bring up a slide about the freight peer to peer program in a minute. The Atlanta Regional Commission participated in an exchange on the freight and land use planning. I encourage you to visit the freight peer to peer website. If it is interesting to you or you would like to appear at one of the exchanges, you can go on the website to learn more.
Caroline, can you highlight your experiences/lessons learned from working with the local jurisdictions?
Caroline Mays:
Yes, we have had tremendous success stories with our local jurisdictions. We have held a freight and land use exchange this past August and we had several of our local jurisdictions actually participate in that. The key here is that they really provided us with a wealth of information and also provided us with some of the details at the regional level where we didn't necessarily have it. It was really, really important and we also involved the local jurisdictions in the freight planning and outlooks in Atlanta. Our MPO funds the comprehensive plans. The coordination efforts and working together has been tremendous with the local jurisdictions.
Jennifer Symoun
How do you prevent freight facilities from expanding or redistributing their structures & activities too close to existing abutting residential areas? Here in New England, this seems to happen a lot.
Caroline Mays:
I don't know. It's not necessarily something that we can prevent. I think we can minimize and mitigate some of the impacts that are associated with those developments. You are seeing the co-existence with the freight and non-freight facilities. The key elements are to develop strategies to mitigate the impacts that are associated with the land uses by creating the buffers and providing if transportation facilities that meet the needs of both the freight and non-freight uses.
Jennifer Symoun:
That is actually a good question for the other presenters on line as well.
Anne Strauss-Wieder:
That is really a discussion for the localized communities. It goes a lot to what Caroline talked about and thinking through and learning how the various land uses work together. What happens if there is an industrial use there first, how do you go back and make them all work together. I think we have discussed some of the techniques that are available.
Jim Dwyer:
Just to add, Jennifer, as Anne mentioned, in our case it could be the opposite. Residential uses are encroaching on the different areas.
Jennifer Symoun:
Caroline, do you have a specific set of freight friendly design standards for urban areas?
Caroline Mays:
The design that we developed is not a statistic; it was an actual study. We didn't highlight it on an urban area; we did it on a regional area.
Jennifer Symoun:
Caroline, how did you track construction vehicle flows?
Caroline Mays:
Out of the construction flows we acquired the data for the freight mobility plan, it provides the commuters, other routes, and other databases; we did interviews, local interviews with the stakeholders within the region. And it was a compilation with that information.
Jennifer Symoun:
Thank you. We will move on to some questions for Jim now. Let's see here. What analysis and promises were necessary to get cities to adopt it?
Jim Dwyer:
I can say a couple of things. The city did this pretty much on their own. There were some additional capital funds that the Maryland Department of Transportation assisted with on the access roads. I don't think that was a lot of money. I think it was in the neighborhood of 7 to $10 million and that is in addition to the highway revenues that the city gets. We stressed that the maritime uses create jobs and we supported the impact that it has on the city and the region. A lot of the direct jobs are held by the residents in the City. Many of these residents don't have higher educational degrees. There is a need for employment for this sector of the population. I guess it is a combination of the dollars to help with the city's roads that lead to the terminals. We are happy that they are contemplating the MIZOD.
Jennifer Symoun:
Are recent studies showing a doubling of cargo by 2020?
Jim Dwyer:
There has been an enormous slow down. I know of other containers that have slowed down and there are other commodities that have slowed down. I think the last report I saw from MARAD, they are still sticking to their guns that they are going to be doubled by the year of 2020.
Jennifer Symoun:
We are going to move on to some questions for Anne. Were some of the freight villages at former military arsenals built after BRAC closures?
Anne Strauss-Wieder:
Many of these military bases were situated in a great location. Raritan Center was a military arsenal that was sold to the public in the 1960s. Nobody wanted to take on the trouble of trying to demolish very tightly built concrete structure where they were designed to withstand aerial bombing, but it is related in some way.
Jennifer Symoun:
The term ''village'' makes a freight operation sound innocuous, but savvy communities are still likely to be opposed to such development. Can these projects still be economically viable at far smaller scales?
Anne Strauss-Wieder:
This is an excellent question. Anything with the term freight in it sends off negative connotations whether we like it or not. We have met with the people and thought they would negatively react to a freight use, but instead they embraced it. Coming out of their conversation was a question of whether the term freight village at a public hearing would set off a negative connotation. They suggested that we go use the term business Gateway. They came to the meetings to support that.
Jennifer Symoun:
How do you quantify the local traffic impacts of these centers? What is expected from the developers in terms of infrastructure on the local road network?
Anne Strauss-Wieder:
The developers have to come forward and indicate what kind of development they are going to develop and occur there. Where it can mitigate in the truck loading generation is that one side coming into and essentially leaving it is going into an alternative mode. It is going into calculation. What makes it more powerful to the municipality fact is that it does have multiple modes being used and bringing the industrial development into the one aggregated areas and allowing them to be disbursed. They are having activities that are mutual to the community and to the development and that works well when you look for the approvals.
Jennifer Symoun:
We will move on to questions for Daniel and Marc. What models did your research employ to 'study the relationship between past freight activities to current land-use pattern changes'. Any spatial econometric models? Also, do the models include freight through Airways, waterways and roadways?
Daniel Rodriguez/ Marc Howlett:
We look at the relationships cross-sectionally and we are looking at no or low freight accumulated land uses. When we look at change, we are looking at the dependent variables as no change decreased concentration over time. Because we don't have the variables we will move do not have the metrics. Most of those are implemented with continuous variables. We are going through a geographic way of regression. There is a strong spatial effect.
Jennifer Symoun:
What data/information is key when blending freight studies and land use overlays/forecasts?
Daniel Rodriguez/ Marc Howlett:
Yes, this relates to the previous question of the types of freight modes and what is being considered. This the two sources of data we want to add is the freight activity and that is a really hard question, hard piece of data. You want it by mode, freight value, and tonnage. Now, that is the freight activities type of things. On the land use side of things, we would like to get as much parcel information as possible to gleam whether the use a freighted use or not. I think in the past we have used the funded activity codes, but they are not that useful, we really want to know what we are seeing is a warehouse regardless if it is Target or Wal-Mart.
Jennifer Symoun:
Are any of your studies available online?
Daniel Rodriguez/ Marc Howlett:
Yes, the airport study is available. I would be happy to point out the URL or folks can e-mail me.
Jennifer Symoun:
How did you derive the top factors affecting businesses? Are they from a survey or interviews?
Daniel Rodriguez/ Marc Howlett:
One way to validate those is through a national or regional survey for the shifts or the carriers, but we haven't done that.
Jennifer Symoun:
The last question that was directed to everybody and that is what you have done in terms of direct rail service on the freight planning. Is there anyone that would like to respond to that?
Caroline Mays:
I will jump in. As part of developing our freight mobility plan, we did an analysis of our freight network and the challenge there is that very few people understand the constraints that the rail network faces. They face the same congestion as the highway network. That was a concern with our network. When we presented that information to them and also we found out that most of our networks were shared with rail. Some of those were shared by a passenger rail. Within our region, it is considered to be Amtrak. This blocks the rails for at least two hours per day. The challenge is critical to understand the constraints that are faced by the railway sector. Yes, there is potential, but again, yes, there are needful investments in the rail network in order to be able to experience the shift that we had hoped for.
Anne Strauss-Wieder:
Actually, that is a great lead on what I was going to say on the freight villages. The freight villages can provide that into the industry. You can provide the critical mass that Class 1 railroad be necessary to a certain area. There may be a short line operator, and there are short line railroads handling things. But the Raritan center has 4,000 or 5,000 carloads a year.
Jennifer Symoun:
Thank you. At this point, we are about out of time. We have gotten through everything that was typed in. I want to thank all of the presenters today. We had great presentations and this is one of the most popular seminars that we have had. I thank you for attending today. All of the recordings, documents, and transcripts will be available in the next couple of weeks on the Talking Freight website.
The next seminar will be held on December 10 and will be about Establishment Surveys. Please keep in mind that this seminar is being held on the second Wednesday of the month due to the upcoming holidays. If you haven't done so already, I encourage you to visit the Talking Freight Web Site and sign up for this seminar. The address is up on the slide on your screen. I also encourage you to join the Freight Planning LISTSERV if you have not already done so. With that I will close and say thank you once again. It was a great seminar.
