View the April 2017 seminar recording
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you in the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Nicole Coene and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is: Freight and Land Use Travel Demand Evaluation.
Before I go any further, I do want to let those of you who are calling into the teleconference for the audio know that you need to mute your computer speakers or else you will be hearing your audio over the computer as well.
Today we'll have four presentations, given by:
Dan Hardy of Renaissance Planning is a Principal with 28 years of experience in developing, applying, and communicating context sensitive transportation planning and engineering concepts. He led the delivery of EPA's Complete Streets Building Blocks program and the FDOT Freight Roadway Design Considerations and served as an advisor on the Virginia DRPT Multimodal System Design Guidelines. Volunteer efforts for ITE include serving as the P.I. for the Transportation Impact Analyses for Site Development RP and as a contributor to the Planning Urban Roadway Systems.
Nicholas Kehoe of Toxcel serves as a transportation engineer for Toxcel's Engineering Division. In this role, Mr. Kehoe primarily supports research in freight transportation, transportation safety, and transportation operations. Mr. Kehoe has more than eight years of experience working to improve the nation's freight transportation system, including a recent focus on capacity building and professional development for the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Freight Management and Operations. Further, Mr. Kehoe stays active in freight-related research through his involvement with the Transportation Research Board. Mr. Kehoe serves as the Secretary for the Standing Committee on Freight Transportation Planning and Logistics, the Committee Research Coordinator for the Standing Committee on Truck and Bus Safety, and the Co-Chair in the Young Members Council's Freight and Marine Subcommittee.
Jeffrey Purdy of FHWA has worked on a wide variety of transportation, land use and environmental planning projects at the local, state, and Federal level for the past 25 years. Jeff currently works in the FHWA Office of Freight Management and Operations in Washington DC. His responsibilities include freight performance measures, demand modeling and data improvement, and truck parking. Prior to moving to FHWA Headquarters, he served as the Technical Services Team Leader and Transportation Planner for the FHWA Wyoming Division. Before joining FHWA, Jeff worked for a community and transportation planning consulting firm in Michigan. Jeff began his career as a planner for the Department of Defense, working on Air Force base planning and NEPA. Jeff has a Masters of Urban Planning from Michigan State University.
Birat Pandey, P.E., (FHWA) focuses on the management of critical national freight data programs, providing expertise in freight data applications, modeling and analytical techniques, and support advance freight data and analysis research efforts. His professional experience also includes metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), private consulting businesses, university research and International Organization; and has extensive experience with transportation land-use relationships for solving transportation problems. Mr. Pandey holds an M.S in Transportation Engineering from University of Illinois, Chicago.
In addition to today's speakers, Kathleen Rooney will be helping lead today's discussions.
Kathleen Rooney of Renaissance Planning brings more than 13 years of integrated planning experience, especially in multidisciplinary, outcomes-based collaborations. Her work has focused on innovative and implementable solutions to planning challenges, notably at the federal and state levels in transportation; all grounded in stakeholder engagement. Her specialties include smart growth and livability, public health and active living, transportation demand management, and planning/technical assistance programs.
Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and approximately 30 minutes for audience participation. If you think of a question or comment during a presentation, 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. We will be pausing for discussion after each presenter. During discussion, I will read the questions from the chat pod and we will open up the phone lines. To have our phone line unmuted you will need to press *1 on your phone keypad. If we run out of time and are unable to address all questions we will attempt to get written responses from the presenters to the unanswered questions.
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 notify all attendees once these materials are posted online.
Talking Freight seminars are eligible for 1.5 certification maintenance credits for AICP members. 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. More detailed instructions on how to obtain your credits are available on the AICP website.
For those of you who are not AICP members but would like to receive PDH credits for this webinar, please note that FHWA does not formally offer PDHs, however, it may be possible to receive PDHs for your participation in Talking Freight if you can self-certify. To possibly receive PDHs, please download the agenda from the file download box and submit this agenda to your respective 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.
I'm now going to turn it over to Katie Rooney of Renaissance Planning to get us started.
Katie Rooney
Thanks, Nicole. So, this Talking Freight webinar is structured a little differently for those of you who attend every month. It's part of a larger project on improving freight demand analysis tools. This is the outreach activity in which we are reaching out to the broader practitioner community on what is potentially needed to improve freight demand analysis tools.
The framing for this particular project is that there are a lot of emerging issues that are affecting trade demand evaluation, trip generation tools, a lot of these things. Some of them are demographic. Changing needs of how people are living. What does that mean for freight, goods, and all those types of things? Different expectations about when freight needs to show up. How, new technologies affect this, both in terms of big data and having more data sources, but also larger connected vehicles and autonomous vehicle development? There are new models for governance. We see a lot of mega regions and public private partnerships. As well as just narrowing down and understanding the relationships between land use obligations and zoning and design. Those implications for the transportation system at large, but also what does that mean for freight?
You have these bigger issues running around. But we are getting a handle on where the practice is going and understanding what some of the challenges and opportunities are around these tools and grappling with these issues on the local level.
So, this particular webinar is structured around each session, building upon the previous session. Dan is going to be presenting about where are we now. Understanding the state of practice and addressing some of these issues. Who is doing what? What are some of the things coming out of different parts of the country? New tools and ideas.
Nick is going to talk about where are going? What has been happening more recently with some of the freight travel demand evaluation. Most notably with the SHRP C20 projects. Jeff and Birat are going to talk about how do we get there. What are some of the resources that we are potentially developing? What are some of the resources that FHWA is putting out there? What could potentially be put out there?
On top of that, as a result of this being part of a larger project (and Nicole talked about this a little bit) we're going to each speaker and do Q&A after that and have kind of an open discussion. For those of you who don't want to talk, we will be mining the chat boxes as well as the questions and try to have a bit more of an interactive session than we normally do on these types of webinars. I hope you folks are interested in providing us some feedback about what can we help determine folks need? What issues are you grappling with? What opportunities? What would make your lives easier in this topic? Also, to learn about what is going on out there,. to ask questions about how do these things work. We can potentially have a good interaction about these topics and what's needed. FHWA can help provide some of these or provide guidance about some of these new tools and new developments.
With that we have first poll, I believe.
Nicole Coene
What are the most common products for which you are assessing freight travel demand? Please check all that apply? Long range transportation plans? State-wide freight plans? Project planning? Corridor studies? Development planning? Traffic impact studies? Traffic for operations? Economic analysis? Policy plans? Research products? And other.
Katie Rooney
So, it looks like folks are still responding. Long range transportation plans appear to be the big winner. We are seeing (not surprising) statewide freight plans. Looks like corridor studies rise to the top as well. Less than project planning, but still a respectable almost 40%. We still have a few in the 20's and 30's which seems to be rising. Probably because you started at the top of the list. Traffic impact studies, economic analysis. There's a lot of different uses I think and a much bigger percentage than I thought on some of these.
Let's see. Nicole, do you think we're going slowly enough now? Should close the poll or give us a few more seconds?
Nicole Coene
I think we can go ahead and move on.
Katie Rooney
And so now, with that, we're transitioning over to Dan to talk a little about the state of the practice. I'll be back when we open it up for questions and a little bit more discussion.
Dan Hardy
Great. Thanks, Katie. Dan Hardy, very glad to be here today. Renaissance planning is glad to be working with FHWA and our teaming partner Leidos on this project that has a very long title. Katie's already mentioned it. Really focusing on land-use and demographic trends in freight trip demand analysis. We are however also thinking about how to move forward with an update to the Quick Response Freight manual. They say that it's very difficult. Only the Supreme Being can make a perfect webinar. We use acronyms a lot. You'll see QRFM throughout the presentation. You will later see “Quick Response Freight Manual” as it should be.
Our project for FHWA is working through most of 2017 to consider and develop a final product vision that will look for what is the best way that FHWA and its partners can get better information on freight travel demand evaluation out to folks. Our primary focus right now is on the changing nature of thinking about demographics and land use. So, our literature review and literature scan has focused on that.
As Katie mentioned, we are just getting into an outreach component of our project. In the autumn, we hope to have a vision for how to update the QRFM and consider other options. All 3 speakers today will be talking to you about the research into the community of practice looking for QRFM and parallel community of practice activities. We expect that we will end up with a QRFM 3 being developed during 2018.
Just to get a sense, we have a couple of different poll questions to approach next. They'll be showing up on the screen. For the folks on the call, what is the most important freight demand process gap that you're facing? What are the things that you most need the information on that you don't already have? This includes different types of trip generation associated with freight, it includes things like traffic flow estimates, trip distribution, some new things like behavioral supply chain modeling and so forth. We are also asking, within the last 6 months or so, how many times have you referenced the QRFM 2? We're not trying to do a statistically valid survey here, but mostly get a sense of the folks who are on the call (we've got a couple hundred participants which is great), and just a sense of what your gaps are and what your level of familiarity with the now-10-year-old QRFM 2 is as we go through this webinar.
We will be using the results from this webinar – as you type specific questions into the chat box we'll get to those in between presentations. We'll be doing some follow-up with folks after the webinar goes off as we continue our outreach.
So, it looks like we do have a number of folks that have weighed in already. A fair number of folks – again the QRFM is something that not too many folks are familiar with on the call and that's fine. What we're trying to do is figure out how to get the right products out that people will use. The fact that it's 10 years old is probably why people aren't necessarily using it. I'm also just making sure folks are familiar with it. The most important freight demand process gap, it looks like we have a whole series of interest in areas from the kind of traditional 4-step modeling, generation and distribution and assignments going to traffic flow. As well as some emerging interest in behavioral based supply chain modeling. So, that's good to see. It looks like the polls have pretty much stabilized. I think you can continue to participate in the poll after we close it. I'm going to go ahead and move on.
I want to tell you a little bit about some of the things we have completed in our literature review scan for this project. We called it a scan initially because we wanted to identify the key foundational resources and recognized that there is a lot of supplementary literature. Some of that we think is key. We've developed a sense of what we found out of these documents. We recognize that there are a lot of other resources out there. I'll talk about a couple and if there are things that you as a participant say “Wow, I think there is really something I've done or that I'm using,” we'd love to have that information coming to us through the chat boxes.
One thing I'll note is that, since it's been 10 years since QRFM 2 was developed, we see kind of an iterative relationship between research and development and applications. The QRFM was the end of a stage of research and development in freight demand modeling. In addition to the QRFM in 2007, there were a series of good syntheses and reports that summarize the state of the practice and set up the next wave of research that from 2012 onward, largely through the SHRP 2 C20 process that Nick will be talking about tin the 2nd part of the presentation and NCHRP 08-96 that continue the research.
We're kind of at an interesting place where if you do go look at the QRFM 2 focus, it's basically set up with a little brief introduction about why freight demand modeling, but the immediate document is 5 chapters (3-7) that really talk about different types of models of increasing complexity and a series of 4 chapters that get into “What are the applications? What are the examples you can use if you want to figure out how to apply one of the models to a particular problem that you've got?”
You'll see that on the applications side in the last few years there are a lot of products. There is a great wealth of material to build from. In terms of continuing R&D, there are some things coming out of SHRP 2 C20 in terms of models that we think will be ready for publication over the course of the next year. Maybe not so much in emerging R&D in terms of case studies, but we're hoping to hear ideas from participants in terms of case studies that we should be considering. Activity based models are just emerging. They've become mainstream for general purpose travel, auto travel if you will. Passenger travel. It's emerging in terms of freight demand.
We've kind of divided our literature findings into things that fit within the QRFM and topics that are beyond the scope of the 2007 manual. We're gauging interest in incorporating those things into updated materials. Probably the biggest step forward in the last decade or so has been a shift from the land use based ITE land use code to more of an econometric model and activity based model. There is a production consumption link that shows the nuances that we're starting to dig into in terms of – not just trip origin-destination at a site or at a traffic analysis zone – but the flow of goods between producers, mid-range transfer points, and consumers.
The introduction of the service generation in addition to the freight generation or freight trip generation concepts.
One of the things that is emerging that we hope we'll be able to wrap into the QRFM is more online tools that will help people operationalize that shift from classic office/retail/industrial land-use to more NAICS code based land uses. Some trip generation estimators online allow you to put in ZIP codes, NAICS codes, and get some information about more context sensitive trip generation.
Another emerging tool is ITE. Has developed their latest draft trip generation handbook. It is a recommended practice being balloted for final. It does include a reference for best practice in terms of doing truck data collection surveying and what kind of questions you might want to ask to get better information to validate your models.
Shipping is a beyond QRFM concept. 4 topics we see as particularly germane: on the land use context, NCHRP 08-96 is looking at something that is happening around the country. We have a lot of places, in urban areas particularly, transitioning form an industrial legacy into more of a mixed-use environment. A lot of guidance for how to think about not only the movement of goods, but the environment those goods are operating in as you have more mixed uses and redeveloping areas.
You can even go into the design side. Some of the work that the Florida DOT has been doing in the Tampa area looking at how you take truck demand flows on a network, how you look at the industrial areas and the livability areas and come up with a way of thinking about a matrix of design approaches that reflect the fact that there is a whole continuum of low freight activity to high freight activity. Places where livability is incredibly important and places where livability is (frankly) a little less important. And how can you start giving guidance, not just to the freight planners, but also land use planners and decision makers in thinking about the kind of city or region they're creating.
In terms of reliability, an area that has known for a long time that it's important to shippers and producers in particular, one of the Best Paper awards at last year's TRB was work done under the guidance of Florida DOT to get a sense of what is the value of the relative ratio of reliability as opposed to travel time and breaking it out to provide some information in terms of what type of user you are and what type of commodity you're working with to really get some better information on those kinds of relationships.
From the last two pulled together, scenario planning and mega regions, some work done in the mid-Atlantic in consortium with the Oregon DOT and the National Center for Smart Growth in the Chesapeake Bay area, both thinking beyond regional to mega regional scale and looking at scenario planning. What happens if energy prices spike? What does that do in terms of freight costs getting from one place to another? So, there's some interesting things coming out here that we think are ready for primetime.
There's also some gaps we've found. Again, at the risk of being a broken record, we'd love to hear your thoughts on gaps. We know cost of congestion is important. The goods movement piece of value pricing, we think there is more information that could be developed. As shown on the City Labs article here, folks like Transfix that are getting into being the Uber for trucks. How the private sector is doing decision-making that's changing the way the public sector works and improving scalability and transferability and data.
Nick is going to talk more about SHRP 2 C20. We're looking at all the studies that are coming out of that and their applicability. Finally, out of that, we want to know from you where your knowledge gaps are. How can this be better delivered to you?
After this webinar, we're going to be planning a 2nd web-based conversation in June, a peer exchange in July, and then developing that vision and working to implement products. During or after the webinar, please type your information in to the chat box. Afterwards, we set up freightdemand@gmail.com as a place to start compiling ideas as we move forward on this project.t
That concludes my presentation. I think I'm now turning the floor over to Katie to get into a little bit of a Q&A.
Katie Rooney
So, we have a few questions that have come in. One is Paul is talking about an NHI course that covers freight and land use and there is a link provided. But I think the first one that I'm seeing is from Todd Graham: Why is ZIP code a geographic unit of analysis. It does much better for me that any other local geographic unit. Todd, if you'd like to chime in (or anyone)?
Dan Hardy
I'll jump in too; it looks like Jose Holguin-Veras who has done a lot of the work in this regard has gotten a great response in terms of these approaches and data manipulation work at any level of analysis. The ZIP code is the most publicly available piece of information. And that gets back to one of the gaps that we're seeing that we need to figure out how to get out to the practitioner is the scalability and transferability of information.
Katie Rooney
We did have a comment from Christine Wolf that the manual is not applicable in many cases. If someone, either you Christine or someone else would like to talk about this. It would be helpful to have a discussion besides just truck freight. Maritime, railroad, or some of the intermodal connections as well. Dan, do you want to respond to that one?
Dan Hardy
That's a very good point. What we have seen to some extent in the version 2 of the QRFM, if you think about the kind of standard 4-step modeling approach, freight has the mode split as well in terms of pipeline, rail, ship, etc. In addition to different types of rolling stock for trucks. QRFM 2 focused for the greatest extent on over-the-road trucking demand most relevant to the state DOTs for a wide range of transportation planning. But it's interesting to hear that thought as well. Maybe QRFM should delve a little more into the planning for other modes besides the over the road trucking.
Katie Rooney
Yeah, and I guess Mark Howard is also following up on what is being done to follow up on information that is often proprietary in nature and closely held. Maybe folks have some thoughts on that. I don't remember the research covering too much of that.
Jeff Purdy
This is Jeff, I think maybe I can try to address that. It's one of the things that we're looking at as part of this overall research. What is obtaining and sharing data? We're looking at and are going to be publishing reports that talk about some of this information. Ways agencies can pool funds to obtain data that is available through the market to make it more economically efficient to obtain that data. Also looking at templates for agreements that you can enter into for private entities for non-disclosure to protect the proprietary nature of that data. As well as some of the limitations, some states have sunset rules and other things that make that data vulnerable to a FOIA request, so we're going to be looking at some of the best practices that have been used in terms of partnering a third-party intermediary that can obtain data from private sector sources, analyze it, compile it, and provide it for use by public sector agencies. But by having that third-party intermediary, you have sort of a firewall that protects the private company from FOIA requests for the data.
So, we're going to have some more coming out on that soon as part of this overall research project.
Katie Rooney
It looks like a lot of folks are very interested in the intermodal component. “I work for a port, so the intermodal is very important and there's very little to help them understand the role of the facility.” There tends to be a lot of tension between goals as far as how the model is being used. We get a few comments about that as well. Proponent of rail projects tend to downplay the trucks trip generation and upsell the trucks-off-the-road upside. So, there is definitely a lot of interest in that element. Something we should pay attention to.
Are there any other questions from anyone on the line or through the chat box?
One of the big questions that we wanted to ask folks is are there any documents or resources that we missed? One mentioned earlier was that NIH has a good summary of a lot of these things in one of their courses. But are there other things that if you were talking about this topic you'd expect us to review and delve into a little bit more. Or have we captured everything?
Nicole Coene
There's a question from Theresa: “Is there any research on secondary and tertiary truck trips?”
Dan Hardy
That's a good topic for us to look into. I know that Southern California Association of Governments has done some research in that regard. It's not something we see highlighted in our scan, but if you have some additional sources it would be great if you could share those.
Jeff Purdy
As part of the SHRP 2 C20 program, we've funded a few different behaviors based activity models, trip generation models that are looking at truck tours. So, we've got a few metropolitan areas that have developed tools or models for doing truck tours that would look at the chain of tours that a truck would take in making multiple deliveries. We've got models for both trucks that are doing deliveries in an urban area as well as commercial service vehicles that maybe aren't carrying freight but are providing services and looking at the tour they take around a metropolitan area. So, we're looking at developing models for that also.
Katie Rooney
It looks like also that Seattle is presenting a report at the Western IT conference about public and private academic research. You may want to coordinate with them as well. I think that we've talked a little about the intermodal challenges and you guys gave us some great information. Are there other challenges you anticipate encountering over the next decade as it relates to this topic? Are there other things, not on the intermodal element, but that you see coming? I think the private data is probably another strong one, but are there other things that are thorny or that you would like…
We've got some stuff coming in.
We have one more question for folks: would an updated QFRM be useful?
One is from Gloria Jeff: “Is there any research associated with alternative routing requirements and seasonal and climate related changes?”
Dan Hardy
Good topic. Something that we didn't see highlighted in the scan. Reliability is important and reliability goes along with redundancy in the system. There is a fair amount that goes into consistency of routing for a variety of reasons. And resiliency is another. Resiliency to market changes. Good thoughts for us to wrap into the further work.
Katie Rooney
Another one is addressing freight planning in rural regions and bridge states, especially when these states and regions may have smaller staff and less capacity to handle major freight modeling in house. I can certainly imagine that in a lot of communities.
Dan Hardy
One of the major challenges about mega regions is you have this public and private partnership – not a formal thing necessarily – but you do have corridor coalitions that are beginning to formalize their PPP relationships. But the idea that we have a number of formal planning geographies that we're all familiar with and the concept of the megaregion is looking to provide that bridge, almost from the inside out from economic centers. And that links to Paul's question about a lot of places where there might be an important panhandle type location of states that might not be generating demand but are key in satisfying demand.
Katie Rooney
Another one from Ed Mierzejewski he's talking about truck parking needs and truck platooning and how that works. It looks like also Christine: manufacturing industrial centers especially those with ports and synergistic freight dependent land uses that are important both to industry and quality of life. You should be able to not only do urban delivery but also address the needs of MICs.
Jeff Purdy
I think Edward's comment about truck parking is a good one that we should look at. I'm thinking in terms of how the location of truck parking facilities, particularly if you've got deliveries that are coming to a major urban area. A lot of times, drivers need a location for staging prior to making their delivery appointment. I think truck parking for staging purposes could influence the routes they take before ultimately arriving at their destination.
Dan Hardy
We know ATRI is interested and concerned about requirements for truck drivers being able to have a good quality of life and often that staging area for the truck driver him or herself is important. That is a key part of the truck delivery trip.
Katie Rooney
One more question from Eric: Any research on international pass-through corridors, in particular in between US between Alaska and Canada?
Dan Hardy
Good comment and to some extent what pops in my head is groups like I-69 Corridor Coalition that are thinking about not just mega regions but international coordination. That gets back to what I heard early on about the need to think intermodally about these longer distance freight movements. Trucks are going to be a key element of it but we also need to consider the other modes as well.
Katie Rooney
We also had some follow-up on the truck parking also during weather events. Kind of connecting two previous comments regarding staging and parking being spot on.
Let's see. We also have Rich Kuzmyak: “Glad to hear that commercial service activity is being modeled. Package delivery and service vehicles make up a substantial share of urban traffic, the efficiency of which is heavily tied to land use patterns. In terms of the number of stops per hour, trip length, and those sorts of elements.”
Research and data on empty truck movements would be helpful. CA-VIUS will probably have some information on those trips.
From Jose: We are planning on rolling out in the next few months, a web based platform to compute freight generation, freight trip generation, and service generation. Stay tuned.
Are there any last-minute comments? No one responded to the QFRM, but I think there are enough issues here, if the manual is reconfigured and started to address some of these that would definitely a helpful resource to help folks tackle some of these problems.
Dan Hardy
I'm imagining Nick probably has a couple of ideas even in the SHRP 2 C20 work that he's about to present. We should encourage folks to keep typing and maybe move on?
Nicole Coene
I think Jeff you wanted to show a slide or two to frame where Nick was going?
Jeff Purdy
What I wanted to do was give a little bit of background on the SHRP 2 C20 program. The subject matter that we're talking about today feeds part of the research that we're doing with this overall effort. I know that there is a number of people on the call that are probably familiar with the C20 program but I wanted to briefly give a little background on it to set the framework and then nick is going to go into more detail on some of the relevant research initiatives and pilot projects that we have going on as part of the C20 program. The SHRP 2 C20 freight demand modeling and data improvement program has a few focus areas that were trying to set as priority initiatives – developing a range of forecasting tools and methods that can be applied either at the state level, MPO level, or even tools that can be used at the local level. Getting to specifically freight data and resources, we have a wealth of data that's available at the national level. The Freight Analysis Framework (which provides good data for mass movement of trucks) provides origins and destinations by state and major metropolitan areas. But looking at other data that's available or other methods of taking a lot of the data that's available and breaking it down so it can be used at sub-regional levels or ZIP code or TAZ levels for local planning purposes. We're also looking at behavior based modeling approaches for freight movement. I mentioned we've got a few pilot sites that have been funded to develop these new models. Also looking at a standardized portfolio of core freight data sources and data sets that can be used as well as building partnerships for sharing data between agencies and throughout a region. Also looking at techniques and standard practices for reviewing and evaluation freight forecasts. Sort of the area we're talking about today – looking at how economic, demographic, land use and other factors influence freight trip generation.
Now some of the specific initiatives that we have as part of the C20 program; we have research being done through TRB which provided some specific recommendations on what we should be doing with this program. The program has oversight by freight modeling and data expert task group which is made up of experts and practitioners in the field. That is directing the research and the implementation of pilot projects. We have 11 states around the country that have pilot projects going on. Nick is going to talk about this in more detail. We've got several that we're looking at innovations in collecting and analyzing – using freight data at the local level. We also have as I mentioned a few pilot sites that have developed behavior based freight models.
I recognize a number of names of people on the webinar that have participated in our regional freight data workshops. We're holding 8 workshops around the country, we're about 2/3 done with that. We're looking at ways of building partnerships at the regional level. MPOs working together and adjacent states working together. So, that's another effort that we have as part of this. We also have some specific research activities. One is we're developing a guide book on behavior based or agent based supply chain modeling. So, it will provide tools and information and where you go to get more information from states or MPOs that have developed these behavior-based models for freight purposes. The area that we're focusing on today is incorporating land use and demographic trends into freight trip demand analysis. An area that will be vital in terms of updating some of our models. That's leading to the development of an update to the QRFM. As Dan mentioned it's about 10 years old so it's due for an update. In addition to the Talking Freight, you may also want to follow the freight model improvement portal where we have webinars and resources available for sharing.
A lot of the results of this SHRP 2 C20 program will be provided through the freight model and travel model improvement program website. With that I'll turn it over to Nick who's going to go into a little more detail about some of our pilot projects as part of the C20 program.
Nick Kehoe
Thank you. My name is Nicholas Kehoe. As Katie mentioned earlier and Jeff just mentioned, the focus of my presentation is going to be where we are going. I've been leading FHWA SHRP 2 C20 implementation for the last 2.5 years or so and overseeing some of the pilot projects around the country.
What I'm going to do today is provide a very quick over view of the pilot project. Jeff did a good job just now, discussing the overview of SHRP 2 C20. I'm going to dive in and discuss several of the pilot projects in more detail and then finally close out with some outcomes, gaps, and next steps on this topic.
I'll go through this fairly quickly, Jeff mentioned SHRP 2 C20 implementation assistance program awarded 11 projects back in 2014, 7 focused on innovative approaches to local freight data, 4 focused on behavior based freight modeling. I'm not going to read off the entire list, but I do want to recognize all 11 agencies that were awarded implementation assistance. You can see on the graph that the triangles represent the local data projects and that looks at projects that were either collecting new data, developing new data, or were integrating data sets. The stars represent the projects that were working on the behavior based freight models that focused on developing more of an agent based model better showing freight transport across the country and local touring behavior.
So, I'm going to move forward and talk about just a few (3 in particular) projects that we think best match the topic of today's call. The first one is an interesting project from the Winston Salem MPO. In recent years, down in NC, there has been an increase in manufacturing activity and the MPOs in the region had a partnership to work on passenger modeling. But didn't have what they wanted in terms of freight demand modeling and that type of thing.
What's neat, they, as a partnership of MPOs as well as the state, laid out a 3-phase process to move from where they were to developing a behavior based mode. The pilot project that they were awarded under the SHRP 2 C20 program focused on Phase 1. They identified the lay of the land regarding what freight activity was occurring in the region and helped set the course for identifying what data they need to collect in the future and what settings they needed to develop for the freight model.
Something that might be interesting for the folks on the phone today – going into this project one of the main, first outcomes of the project was they could purchase some business data, I believe it was an info USA database. With that data combined with aerial imagery or satellite imagery from google earth or other free services or whatever free service you use as well as some land use data could identify and quantify over 1000 freight facilities in the region.
So, they took that information and developed a data base to describe the freight facilities in the region and set up a way to capture and quantify the freight activity. So, the data base includes some basic information such as the facility, name, type, location, but also includes information that they gathered from satellite or aerial images, such as an estimation of facility size, a truck bays, that type of thing.
So, they went out both in person and mailing surveys and could capture information on many of the facilities in the region. With everything combined, one outcome of this project was they developed these quick, back of the envelope estimates of relationships with some of the data they collected. For example, they developed some rough estimates where, if you were a planner and there was a freight facility you were looking at, you could easily estimate the facility size or truck bays, you can get a rough idea based on the data they collected of the freight demand and the trucks in and out of the facility.
I thought this was a pretty neat outcome so that they could quickly make a simple ball park calculation that can be used right away, very easily, by some of their planners.
The second project I want to talk about was done by the SD DOT. This project was neat because it was different than a lot of the projects on this subject. This focused on tying together transportation data with agricultural data. SD's economy is very highly correlated to their agricultural activity. There's a lot of agricultural activity in the state. The difficulty that the DOT and planners find is that agricultural activity is very varied. The crops continue to change with rotation, the production changes with weather or climate changes, so it's difficult for the state to understand where freight activity is going to occur based on agricultural activity.
So, what they did was try to come up with a way to do that. What SD did, was they started with a thorough literature review to understand the history and trends with regards to agriculture in the state. As part of this, they went through and identified some data sources. These data sources in many cases are publicly available and maintained by the state or federal government, they just hadn't been used – at least not in SD. So, they identified these data sources and then set up a number of stakeholder interviews with both stakeholders with a transportation and agricultural background to get a better understanding of what data is used, how it is used, why and what the needs are for the different stakeholders, and what are some of the gaps.
Taking all of this together, the project team was able to estimate truck traffic impacts based on crop production. What they did was, based on a number of factors – land use data, agricultural data, crop production, crop yields – were able to at the sub-county level and township level come up with an estimated truck impact. For this project, they used estimated equivalent single axle loads for different townships. Now what they had are forecasted truck traffic impacts. Also from the transportation side, some information on roadway types or the availability of infrastructure. Whether it was bridges, road, gravel roads, and so on.
They were able to take these 2 data sources and combine them and provide some input into the decision-making process where now they can target specific townships. We're talking a low level in terms of scope where money might be best spent on improvements or maintenance based on truck traffic and crop production.
The third and final pilot project I want to talk about today is the American Association of Governments project. The previous 2 I spoke about were innovations of local data pilots. They were looking at how to used data in different ways. This project is developing a behavior based model. MAG did a really good job on this project. I could talk about this for a while, but I'm trying to keep it under the scope of this meeting today.
To give you some back ground, the project in AZ, the Sun Corridor Mega Region is home to the majority of the residents of Arizona. There is significant truck traffic. The Maricopa Association of Governments wanted to work together to develop a megaregional model that would have the ability to estimate multimodal freight movement as well as truck touring and surface moves in the urban areas and take that information and be able to integrate with passenger models and be able to inform with policy for decision-making.
As I said, this is a pretty big project, but in terms of what I think is good to call out today in terms of what we're talking about, some of the findings you might find very useful is the data inventory. Many of these SHRP 2 C20 projects did this, but Maricopa Co. did a good job of developing a really robust data inventory where they went through and documented local data, state data, or nationwide data and identified the source, data type, description, coverage very well. It's very comprehensive and publically available. So, if anyone is interested in identifying new data sources, a lot of this is already documented. The work is already done. So I think that is something useful on this topic.
Another interesting thing, talking about changing demographics on the topic of Dan and Katie's project – Maricopa County developed a lot of very innovative models that capture changing demographics with regard to the freight agents – the buyers or sellers. Historically, many models either use a straight line estimate or don't really make any changes in demographics for the forecast year. This MAG project spent a lot of time developing a really neat process to evaluate or estimate changes in demographics over time.
Some key gaps. What did we find as some key gaps from these 11 pilot projects? Some of these have been talked about already in the chat or by other presenters. But just going down these 3 topics from data. Data collection – to collect the data yourself costs a lot of money. Even if you're able to find private sector partners who are willing to share data with you, what we found even in these pilot projects is that is challenging. You can have a verbal agreement with the private sector, but then changes in priority or staff can sort of halt that data sharing. I believe Jeff mentioning before FHWA working on some templates for those agreements.
Sort of on the same lines, purchasing data – there is a lot of good data available at relatively low cost compared to actually going out and collecting it yourself. The challenge – and I believe this has been mentioned before – is licensing. If you're an agency that goes out and purchases data often, you're probably quite familiar with this. But at least to my knowledge, there's no good guides available now that walk someone new through this process in terms of licensing and want you should think about in terms of standard terms, how do you plan on using the data for the project. There's a lot of questions where if you're very new to this, you might not really know to think about.
In terms of skills, experiences, and equipment – as more and more data is being developed in terms of freight data, you're needing more and more powerful equipment and skills to analyze that.
These behavior-based models are quite complex. Many of the teams included both a number of modeling staff on their team as well as multiple consultants. They are complex and take up significant time and resources. That said, a lot of this information is available. FHWA has funded some of the models in the past that these new SHRP 2 pilot projects were based off of. There is transferability and integration but there are some challenges doing that and getting those models integrated with existing systems.
Lastly, implementation moving forward. Really what we see here is these pilot projects are very specific to the actual pilot. There is no one size fits all. The outcomes and processes can be generalized and applied to other areas, but it's not drag and drop. There needs to be some more guidance for other agencies that have to do this.
I'll wrap up here quickly with what is next. FHWA is doing some of that. Putting out the guidance. But in terms of C20 and what I'm involved in, we're developing case studies, outreach materials, self-assessment tools, and a handbook. The first two are the case studies and the outreach materials. They are going to be like what you heard from me today but they are going to provide much more detail on each of the 11 projects. The self-assessment tool that is going to help agencies get a better idea of where they are with freight data and modeling.
Lastly, the handbook is going to be a reference manual that agencies can use to quickly get pointers on different strategies with regard to modelling or freight data.
With that, my contact information is on and I will turn it back over to Katie.
Katie Rooney
We had some comments and questions come in that I want to throw out there. Is there any advice with how to work an MPO that uses a behavior based model with people but is lagging with regards to a compatible freight model?
Nick Kehoe
I think it all depends. There are a lot of specifics with regards to different types of models. The first thing is you need to figure out what the similarities are between the two. What overlaps / what data can be used between the two and see what processes can overlap. That will help you integrate it. I'd highly recommend you check out some of the final technical reports from the 4 behavior based models developed under C20 or the case studies we're developing to get a better idea of behavioral based freight models that are currently the cutting edge in terms of research and how they overlap with the MPOs existing models.
Katie Rooney
I think just having access to that information would be helpful too. I think a lot of people just don't know what the data looks like. The next one we have is from a few folks “What difference does all this make? How do we tie the knowledge of what is happening with the policy or infrastructure tools to affect the outcome?” I think there is also a follow-on question about how many MPOs and state DOTs are using these analyses to justify or rationalize investments as well as to augment funding proposals vis a vis the FASTLANE grants. Are you finding folks to be able to make those connections and influence the future outcomes? I think you've demonstrated some of these examples.
Nick Kehoe
I'll say, for sure these pilot projects are just wrapped up. I can't talk about long term outcomes in terms of justifying costs. I'd recommend again, if you want to contact me directly, I can send you some information on the various projects. Mid-America Regional Council project had this as one of their key goals – trying to quantify in dollars and cents the costs of congestion in the region to help justify and prioritize freight projects. It's certainly an emphasis on many of these projects. I'd be happy to talk offline if anyone is interested.
Katie Rooney
The last one that we're getting is what is the time table for the next activities on your project?
Nick Kehoe
On mine, if we turn it back over to the group, Jeff can probably speak to the longer scale – a lot of these case studies have outreach materials currently being reviewed by FHWA. We should be able to wrap them up in a couple months. My project ends in September. Everything in terms of outcomes should be done by the end of the year I imagine.
Katie Rooney
Jeff, do you want to follow up?
Jeff Purdy
A lot of these pilot projects are pretty much complete. We have a couple of the behavior models that are just wrapping up final documentation. We've got a lot of publications and reports going through final review for publication. I'd expect between now and the end of the calendar year you'll see a lot of the information coming out. In terms of what we're talking about today which is the land use and freight trip generation guidance that is probably going to be more towards the end of the year. We also have the guide on developing behavior based models. That will probably be coming out sometime toward the end of the calendar year. Maybe into the beginning of next year when that will finally get published. Ultimately one of the follow-ups to all of this effort will be an update to the QRFM. That will be at the tail end of all this research. I think we'll be looking into that effort over the next year or so.
Katie Rooney
At this point we wanted to throw out a few questions so folks can respond in the chat boxes. What are some of the opportunities you see arising out of some of this work that Nick presented on and also what is striking about some of these examples? We want to get a sense of what is compelling and helpful from different folks' perspectives. Feel free to put some of that in the chat box. I think that since we're running a few minutes behind it makes sense to transition to Jeff and Birat to talk about where we're going and some of the things you wanted to talk about and flag and inform.
Birat Pandey
Thank you, Katie. Good afternoon, I'm Birat Pandey with FHWA Office of Freight Management and Operations. I'm here today to talk about a national freight data product from Freight Analysis Framework or what is known as FAF. My objective for today's presentation is to provide some basic information about existing national level freight data to support the goal of this webinar. What data is available through FAF is very relevant within the context of today's webinar which focuses on development of a guidebook on freight land use travel demand evaluation methods. This is also a great opportunity to know how FAF is supporting your current data needs and what you'd like to see as future data improvement.
Many of you already know about FAF. All the FAF data products are available for public download from FHWA Office of Operations webpage. In today's presentation, I will focus on a few key elements from this data and will provide national level freight statistics examples that may be relevant for freight transport decision analysis at a lower geographic scale.
Before I dive down into some of the examples that I want to show you I want to quickly mention the purpose of FAF. Freight is important to our nation's economy and to support our mission of promoting an efficient, seamless, and secure freight flow around the US transport system and across our borders, every 5 years FHWA in partnership with BTW and census develops this data to provide a resource on national freight flow.
This dataset plays an important role to strategically direct freight transport system resources at the national level and supports state DOT and local transportation agencies' freight data needs. FAF is probably the only publically available data source that provides a comprehensive resource of long-distance national freight movement data across all modes of transportation.
This slides lists a few basic questions that are common for most freight transport related decisions, whether it is freight policy evaluation, or development of a state freight plan or identification of critical freight corridors. All of these activities resolve around the need to understand the effect of freight flows in transportation systems. This leads into a need for fundamental information such as: What commodities are moving into and out of and through my region? How have these flows changed over time? How does this flow compare to other states and regions and so on and so forth? Data published from FAF4 is useful for all these questions, particularly if the analysis' geographic scale is at larger metropolitan scale, at state-level, or the national level. Due to the larger metropolitan scale, geographical average representation of FAF data, supplementary local data may be necessary for project-level evaluation and analysis. Therefore, what data that is available through FAF is an important element for consideration to discuss what is needed within the context of today's webinar goal.
Now, a little more about the data itself – similar to previous FAF, the FAF 4 data base has 2 major components. As you can see in the slide, a table and matrices with origin and destination information for various commodities and estimates of truck flow on the highway transportation networks. Original destination table tells you the 2 end points of transported commodity by mode, tonnage, and value. For a base-year scenario and future year scenarios. Similarly, the network flows provide information and estimated truck flows for a base year and a future year.
Transportation agencies want to know about freight flows and truck volumes to make infrastructure investment decisions. This slide is an example of information that can be obtained from FAF4 data. Detailed commodity-level information such as in this case, the top 2 US commodities by value, electronics and machinery. $8.2 trillion in 2045, representing about 22% of total freight value.
Estimates of truck flow on the roadway suggest that this slide can support identification of major freight corridors. Local congestion and bottleneck information with freight truck flows allows increased understanding of freight transportation systems. A geographic definition of each FAF zone is shown in this slide. The entire US is divided into 132 FAF zones. 8 international zones to represent the remaining world. Multiple countries are represented as 1 FAF zone. In some cases, an entire state is a FAF zone.
So, there are some limitations in terms of geographical representation for origin destination tables. Therefore, to support freight decision analysis lower than FAF zones, a supplementary analysis may be needed. A guidebook with application examples of methods and analysis that focuses on freight, land use, and travel demand relationships at a smaller area is important and helpful.
Against, this is another example of statistics that shows current and future estimates of freight flows developed from past data. This slide shows that between 2012 and 2045 the US will see freight activity grow by about 50% in tonnage and more than double in value. International value will grow by almost 300%. Information such as this is an important element of freight transportation planning and analysis.
This is another example of information from FAF that shows truck represents UPS as the dominant freight carrier now and into the future.
This slide shows the network of FAF, which is larger than the National Highway Freight Network. Truck traffic estimates from FAF 4 could be useful for critical urban freight corridors and critical rural freight corridors designation process as one of the data elements for the decision-making process.
Finally, FAF 4 related products are available for download from FHWA's Operations webpage. It is listed in here. We are also planning for a FAF 4 webinar series starting in early June. Please stay tuned for that. We'll be communicating with you with webinar details in the next few weeks.
In terms of data downloads, a more customized table can be extracted by using web-based data extraction tools as opposed to downloading the entire FAF 4 data set. That is listed in here as well. There are several publications that can be useful for quick statistics depending on what kind of information you may want to develop at a local or statewide transportation region label.
So, with this, I would like to end my presentation and pass the remaining time to Jeff to talk about some additional information on FHWA resources.
Jeff Purdy
Thanks, Birat. I just wanted to quickly wrap up with some resources. During Dan's presentation, he touched on the QRFM. It provides a number of resources and tools that can be used for different methods, whether it is following the traditional 4-step travel forecasting model or looking at different types of economic activity models. It provides tools and resources.
As we mentioned, the QRFM 2 is a little over 10 years old. As an outcome of a lot of the efforts that we're currently undertaking with this project and the other SHRP 2 C20 projects, we'll be looking at initiating an updating to the QRFM. This will look at some of the new advancements in freight modeling such as behavior based modeling, touring models, some of the advancements that have been achieved recently, including some of the pilot sites that we had as part of the SHRP2 C20 program. Also looking at new technology and data. When the QRFM was last updated 10 years ago, the use of GPS probe data was not as widely used as today, as well as a lot of other advanced in ITS technology that can be used to collect data freight movements. So, we're going to be trying to update this manual in the next year to incorporate a lot of these advancements.
As I mentioned, the freight model improvement portal which is also part of the Travel Model Improvement Program, which you may be familiar with. It does regular webinars and also has a website with substantial resources and links to where you can obtain freight data, examples of freight models, and where you can go to get additional information. I'd also recommend following that website.
I think that about wraps it up for us. This Birat's and my contact information if you have any more questions. With that I think I'll turn it back over to Katie.
Katie Rooney
I think we have a poll question. One last one to round out what you guys said. It covers what types of things people are using right now in their work. We did ask a little about the QRFM earlier, but we wanted to get a sense of what tools people are using and what's out there.
Not surprising the FAF is high. We're seeing some pieces here and there; it looks like most of them are on the lower side. HPMS, also not too much of a surprise. National Performance Management Research Data Set, also high.
So, the reason we're asking this question is we've hit on a bunch of the gaps and issues that folks are struggling with, but one of the things that comes in with the QRFM update is “what are the ways that people get information when they have challenges. Where do they go? What things are being used that is currently out there.
Dan Hardy
I was going to add to the question about the public policy aspect. There is a brief introduction piece in the existing QRFM. I do think that (as you mentioned) not only the content but the format of how information gets released – one of the goals for the QRFM 3 update would be to find a way to make it more outcome or product oriented. Recognizing that, as we've seen in the first poll question, there are a lot of people using freight evaluation processes for different purposes to help direct folks. If you're trying to set or influence public policy, here are the relevant chapters or examples. If you're trying to develop the next long range plan for your region or state, these are the tools that might be most relevant to you.
So, have everything available to everyone, but try to direct people to the information that is most relevant to them.
Katie Rooney
Let's close up the poll and open it up for questions. Looks like we have a few coming in…
Katie Rooney
Will the next QRFM be rolled out in structure to be used by the various freight advisory committees at the MPO and state levels? Dan, do you want to take that? I think this is part of what we're asking folks – how and what and what sort of needs are associated with that. Dan?
Dan Hardy
I think the answer is yes, that's part of what we're trying to do now. Who are all the users and how should the product be oriented to meet the folks who are going to want to have the most direct access to the information. Jeff to you want to add as well?
Jeff Purdy
The QRFM has a variety of different tools and models. We play to be supplementing that with some of the newer technology and models that are available out there. It provides a range of choices on what approach to take, what models to use, traditional 4-step or some kind of economic models. It provides a range of models that can be used and allows users, whether they're with a state or large MPO or small MPO to look at it and decide what types of analysis you need to do, what type of budget and resources you have, and choose the type of model and scale it to meet your particular needs.
Katie Rooney
This is actually now a question from Gloria: Are you also maybe trying to get to ways of presenting what is in the QRFM for certain types of audiences? If they wouldn't want to look at every moment of it, but is structured to work just within your context. Would something like that be valuable? Maybe there are pieces to which we can direct people that would be a roadmap for QRFM. Maybe those committees don't want to use every single piece of it but want a higher-level resource.
I'm going to open up a few other questions to you guys – “How do you most often access new information related to freight travel demand and its evaluation?” Dan mentioned earlier, what is the best format and maybe there is a need for some audience specific resources. Also, how do you determine the best way to solve your problem? We've hit on a lot of different topics. Is it webinars? Is it consulting with your peers? This series would be a great example of that. It looks like Dan Murray also gave an example of MNDOT that is doing a few things with supply and demand. One of the resources earlier. Sorry, thought that was a question.
What are some the ways we need to think about how to best deliver this update for folks or just other resources in general? Any suggestions / recommendations?
Looks like it is probably just taking the information that we got from the polls and knowing which ones people are using and keeping that in mind.
I think with that, if there are any other questions and comments we are more than happy to open it up, but I think we've got all the questions we wanted to ask and presented all the information we wanted to present. Are there any closing comments from the speakers or questions they received or have seen in the comments before we close out?
Dan Hardy
I'd just like to thank everyone who's been involved both in the preparing and the participants as well. I think the freightdemand@gmail.com is an opportunity to keep that going and for our projects, we'll be reaching out again to folks to keep that going. This has been very fruitful from a presenter's perspective and hopefully also for the participants.
Nicole Coene
We've gotten through all the questions and I don't see anything else coming in. I think we will go ahead and close out. The recorded version of this event will be available within the next few weeks on the Talking Freight website.
The next seminar will be held on May 17, 2017 and the topic is still to be determined. Once registration is available, I will send a notice out through the Freight Planning LISTSERV announcing when registration is open.
I encourage you to join the Freight Planning LISTSERV if you have not already done so.
Thank you to our presenters and to everyone attending. Please enjoy the rest of your day.
