View the December 2017 seminar recording
Jennifer Symoun
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you to the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is Good Practices in MPO Freight Planning.
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 three presentations, given by:
Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. If during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the chat area. Please make sure you send your question to "Everyone" and indicate which presenter your question is for. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will start off the question and answer session with the questions typed into the chat box. 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. In order to obtain credit for today's seminar, you must have logged in with your first and last name or if you are attending with a group of people you must type your first and last name into the chat box.
PDH certificates are now available for Talking Freight seminars as well. To receive 1.5 PDH credits, you will need to fill out a form. Please see the link in the chat box. Certificates will be emailed one week after the seminar. A seminar agenda has been included in the file download box for those who need to submit an agenda to their licensing agency.
Finally, I encourage everyone to please also download the evaluation form from the file share box and submit this form to me after you have filled it out.
Our first presentation will be given by Mike Ruane, a Senior Transportation Planner in the Office of Freight and Aviation Planning for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC). Mr. Ruane has developed new freight data products, conducted technical analysis, and authored community level freight planning documents. While at DVRPC Mr. Ruane has worked to improve the usability of planning products including data visualization and web applications. In addition, Mr. Ruane plays an active role in organizing a quarterly freight advisory committee, the Delaware Valley Goods Movement Task Force, working closely with members of the freight community, member governments, and other public and private partners.
Mike Ruane
Thank you for having me today. I will be speaking about DVRPC's PhillyFreightFinder, our freight data portal for the Delaware Valley. I will be presenting a little bit on the background of the development of PhillyFreightFinder, giving a technical demonstration of the tool itself, and of course the ever-important discussion about data, and we also have an opportunity for replicating PhillyFreightFinder. For those that are not familiar with DVRPC, we are the MPO for Philadelphia. We cover a nine-county region across two states, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We have a very rich transportation infrastructure to help support a number of freight activities across the region. Our network is very complex and some of that complexity is what led into the initial development of PhillyFreightFinder.
This tool is an online application. It's interactive, allowing users to explore different types of freight data in freight network facilities. It was initially launched in 2013 and the driving force behind the creation of PhillyFreightFinder was really our freight advisory committee. Through that committee, specifically the data subcommittee of the Goods Movement Task Force helped to guide the development of the initial tool and has continued to support and guide changes and improvements to the tool since it launched. This tool was built internally and it's really highlighting the years of freight planning and the work that we have done. It represents a new way of presenting the data that we are collecting, as well as the technical studies that we conduct year to year.
An important question that people like to ask is why did we build PhillyFreightFinder? The freight advisory committee helped serve as a driving force. Some of the items that really drove us to build PhillyFreightFinder was to expand the reach of our freight planning efforts in the region. We wanted to take what we were doing over 20 years of freight planning here in the region and get it out of the reports and into a format that more users could use to access it. Not only that, we wanted to make our data available for use in other products because there was a lot of data that we recognized we had but it was confined to our internal databases or a printed report. Ultimately, our goal was to educate public and private partners on the importance of freight to our economy and to our transportation system, so there can be more informed decisions regionally.
From a technical perspective, PhillyFreightFinder can be broken into two pieces, a front-end application, which is the publicly accessible web app, and then the backend management, which is where all the data storage occurs. The front-end application was built 100% in-house. It's built on open source platforms, meaning that there was no cost to purchase the software components that we used to assemble PhillyFreightFinder. It also means it's easily replicated by other agencies. Another key piece of this is we built this independent of the Esri stack. While this does integrate with Esri, it's independent of it so a smaller MPO or an agency that doesn't have access to Esri can still use the code that we've created on the front-end to interact with GIS data. On the back-end we expanded our efforts to really focus on creating automation of tasks and data processing and we store most of our data in an Oracle database. Hopefully that is as technical as I will get today, but for those that may have been interested, that's a high-level look at the technical components of PhillyFreightFinder.
I will run through a demo quickly so that you can see some of what we have done. I will try to highlight some of the data along the way that we are visualizing. For those interested there's a URL along the bottom of this demo, that's where PhillyFreightFinder lives if you want to check it out.
The very beginning of PhillyFreightFinder began in 2013. When it launched it started as just a map viewer, which is an interactive map that allows you to explore the many modes of transportation in the region that are freight related, as well as explore some of the freight centers or land-use areas of freight activity in the region. It was a way of highlighting the importance of freight facilities and as users drilled down into individual facilities we were able to highlight the common names of facilities, so we knew what we were talking about. In addition, it allowed us to publish some of the capacity and activity data we had for facilities so that our partners understood not only what and where the freight centers or freight activity infrastructure was, but what it was capable of handling and what type of activity they might expect out of it.
Working with the freight advisory committee it became clear that some of our partners wanted a little bit more rolled up data rather than the full detail and map form. Something they could see just at the county level, for instance. We created tools that highlight some of the county freight profiles. I'm going to run through Philadelphia County quickly. You can see we provided summaries of some of the freight network, such as the infrastructure, how much they have, what is the total mileage of features, amount of employment related to freight, as well as some imagery around what freight looks like in the counties to help individuals understand what's going on in their jurisdiction a little bit better.
We also had a desire to help them understand their domestic trade patterns so they could relate some of this freight infrastructure to the economy and what's moving on their infrastructure. We utilized some TransSearch data and some other data sets to create a visualization of the trade patterns for each county, so that's what you're seeing here. This highlights the top trading partners and allows users to visualize data based on mode, based on value or volume and inbound or outbound. What's interesting is it allows users to see a little bit more about the distribution channels by mode with the spatial distribution, as well as to how those trading partners change and what the top commodities are as you change variables. So you can see as I move from all modes to rail, that it becomes less local and centered more into Chicago, which is a major interchange for freight rail out of Philadelphia.
Another tool we developed was the maritime indicators tool and that's a way to look at some of the high-level activity from the ports in the region. We have 31 individual terminals in the region that are classified or categorized into four different US Customs ports. So, giving a sense of what Philadelphia's port activity was required us to aggregate a lot of those public data sets and reclassify them as a single port then attempt to do the same for other regions so we could get some metrics to compare our performance. This tool allows users to go year- to-year and see how our annual indicators are tracking against other regions and we focus primarily on total trade, foreign trade, and then because exports are a major initiative in the region that is one of the indicators we track. It is a little less narrative based here, but we are trying to show some high-level trends over time.
Finally, with highway performance being an ever-larger part of what we are interested in, we developed the highway performance section using data and animated visualization of truck travel time and truck average speed across the network by time of day.
There is a lot of data that goes into PhillyFreightFinder and again the back-end of the program is larger. It is something we are committed to year in and year out. Incorporating public data sets, collecting our own and also when necessary, purchasing private data sets. That process was fleshed out a little bit and the report that's in your download pod, Making Freight Data More Accessible, using a SHRP2 C20 grant we were able to step back and look at what we needed and how we would process it. We chose to prioritize data for three main reasons and those are what you see on your screen now. Those that were essential to understanding the intermodal supply for freight movements, those that help us understand the freight demand and supply chain logic, and those that got us towards measuring system performance. You can see 11 of our data sources are public so we are pulling from a lot of federal data sets, processing the data and relating it to the facilities in our region, aggregating and fusing it with other data sets to help us tell a better story of freight.
One of the things that we did learn in evaluating many disparate data sources for our planning purposes was that we really needed data that was recent and frequently updated, as that was a major consideration as we are trying to tell the story of freight in the region. The workload to bring data to current numbers based on trends can be heavy. That was always a consideration. The consistency and reliability of a data set overtime was important to us as we wanted to be able to compare and create trends so that reliability was very important. For the most part, a lot of the federal public data sources seem to fit that and it was also very important to us that we knew what the story was or we knew we could tell the story with that data. In order to continue to tell a story regionally about freight it requires a commitment to continue to collect and process that data so that we can always update our partners and users of PhillyFreightFinder about the changing story of freight. If this were one-off program we would miss a lot of things that are happening. For instance, the ports when they underwent a major decline in imports it was not necessarily because the general cargo ports were dropping, it was because petroleum had shifted to domestic supply. But having an ongoing program allowed us to continue to process the data and keep an up-to-date story being told to our region. This is really important. Having a plan around what your practical uses of data are is really critical to knowing where you have to cut different purchased data sets out of your budget or if certain things are a higher lift for processing, knowing the practical use allowed us to more easily make a decision about what we could and could not work with in any given year.
PhillyFreightFinder it supposed to be a regional resource and it is. We talk about the value that it brings to our partners and the work they do, they're the ones we built this for. We're not selfish, it is not just for us to get our data out there, but it is to make sure that others are using it and it's a productive resource to the region. Some examples of that value, county planners in a couple of the counties in the region have used PhillyFreightFinder and the data available though it to incorporate some freight components into their comprehensive plan and their transportation plan and others have just reached out based on data that was in PhillyFreightFinder to get more detail about some of the freight activity. It also allows us to engage with new partners, both public and private, form new relationships with DHS and FEMA on some critical infrastructure issues in the region and allowing them to access new data points. Being a centralized accessible data resource, it also allows us to improve our outreach in the planning work that we do. With the recent identification of Critical Urban Freight Corridors we were able to use not only the data in PhillyFreightFinder for evaluation of those corridors, but we were then able to publish them to PhillyFreightFinder and allow users to comment on each of the individual recommended corridors so we could get a sense of stakeholder feedback for each of those. It also allowed them to identify what may be the gaps in our evaluation process making the tool a valuable product for us. It is one of the top visited pages on our website other than maybe our job boards and a traffic count viewer, so it is a popular and used tool. It has continued to improve our visibility of the products we create and creates a feedback loop into our planning process. That really helps us in the long term.
One example of how the data efforts have really improved our work is our improved freight center analysis. All of this data collection and management has opened up new doors into how we identify our freight centers, which are clusters of freight generating land uses in the region. We created what we call a freight quotient analysis, which is looking at employment, land-use, and different infrastructure facilities, as well as real estate development. All that data was in PhillyFreightFinder's back-end database and established a new designation of 67 freight centers in our region put into five major typologies listed there. You can see we have a diversity of freight centers, so different types of activity going on in each of these are intended to help planners better understand the activity that's going on at these locations, the type of conflict that may exist with neighboring communities, and it also helps us better prioritize investment long-term as each of these typologies has a different need for highway versus rail infrastructure investment and different access issues. That has been a gain for us from our freight data program.
Finally, the one thing we like to highlight is like I said, PhillyFreightFinder is open source. The web platform that we built all the code on is available online to be used for replication by anybody who would want to. We have also created what's called the oopen Freight App, a simple map interface version, so that mapping components of PhillyFreightFinder, is documented and available for download online. The URL is at the bottom of the screen. Those are just two examples, the St. Louis Regional Freight-Way and WILMAPCO used it to actually create their TIP map. It's more or less a lightweight template that allows people in a low-cost entry point into getting some data online.
We don't think that PhillyFreightFinder is the only way to get freight data online but we think that it's a great starting point and having that freight data published so the story of freight is told helps improve the process long-term in any region as you try to engage new partners that are very important to the freight planning process.
Those products are available, the code is available, and here's a couple more URLs. That's all I have today and I look forward to questions.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you, Mike. I do want to remind everybody if you do have any questions for Mike, type them into the chat pod and we will get to them after all the presentations. Our next presentation will be given by Annie Nam, who manages the goods movement and transportation financial planning department for the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG). She oversees regional goods movement planning studies and researches innovative financial, economic, and policy initiatives related to transportation investments. Prior to joining SCAG, Ms. Nam worked for the City of New York, where she developed financial forecasting models, analyzed capital project financing and economic policy initiatives. Ms. Nam holds a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from Columbia University. Annie was having trouble connecting for the Internet today so I'm going to be clicking through the slides for her. You will hear her saying next slide when it's time for me to move on to each slide. Annie, you can go ahead.
Annie Nam
Thank you. I apologize in advance for the technology challenges here but we just moved offices so we are trying to get underway and I'm also speaking on a cell phone so hopefully everyone can hear me. Jennifer, I am on slide two to start about SCAG. I will start off with context as well for those who may not be familiar with the region. The SCAG region comprises 191 cities and six counties including Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange, Imperial, San Bernardino and Ventura. In terms of land area we are rather sizable. The SCAG region covers about 38,000 square miles and we are home to over 80 million people today and projected to grow to another 4 million. Next slide.
A little more context here as well because the region is the largest international trade gateway in the US supported by marine ports, air cargo facilities, railroads and freeways. The Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach I will note and we also have the Port of Hueneme handling cars and agricultural products. Collectively with the ports of LA and Long Beach, we handled over $473 billion in maritime cargo in 2014 but we also have six commercial airports I'm not going to go through all of them but together they handled over $101 billion in international air cargo in 2014. The regional air cargo transport at LAX, often overshadowed by the Port of LA and Long Beach in terms of international trade is also pretty significant in terms of air cargo. It is the busiest cargo airport in the US. We have extensive freeways and arterials that serve as truck quarters, roughly about half of all of highways in the state of California. Two Class I railroads to help to provide the critical transport to less than 5% of those that travel through the SCAG region to areas east of the Rocky Mountains. Three international border crossings in our Imperial County and Ports of Entry with over $14 billion in trade passing through there in 2014. With the regional products here the 820 billion is roughly a third of the economy that is generated by independent industries and similarly a third of our jobs are generated by these industries and so it is pretty significant that we really focus on data collection and planning. Next slide.
I'm sure most of you are familiar with our San Pedro Bay Ports. This is really integral to much of our planning work here because this is the latest update of the cargo forecast that was incorporated into our regional transportation planning work. The container forecast is generated by the Port of LA and Long Beach together and is a capacity constrained forecast comprising predominately of Asian imports and [Indiscernible] imports for local, national The latest numbers are back to pre-recession numbers at around 50 million to use and projected to more than double by 2035. Next slide.
In order to better understand some of the primary distribution and port trucks we conducted a gate survey back in 2010. We have been utilizing the results of this survey and we are currently working to update this effort working with the ports to go out into a new gate survey. We don't think that it's changed in terms of patterns but it has been a while so we are looking to refresh this because the survey was conducted at each port terminal and the results as depicted here suggest that really the lion's share of the port trucks and primary trips are near the ports and some clustering around the intermodal facilities near downtown LA. Next slide.
I thought this was interesting for us. In addition to the that collection we are also supplementing our data inventory with the recent purchase of GPS data. Here we are using street data to understand the flows and changes since our last data collection effort. This is just an initial analysis and I was having calls with [Indiscernible] last night just to understand some of those flows a little better. More work needs to be done but I thought this map is visually very telling in terms of tracing some of the routes from the port. Some of it is a very familiar, others I'm a little surprised by the density particularly around the 91 there. Next slide.
Here again utilizing GPS data to augment some of our great inventory, this was data from the full month of May 2015. This is OD data. Utilizing the construction of the data set in the map here, unlike the previous port truck OD map, this reflects the SCAG region. A very similar pattern to what we saw previously with the streetlight in terms of the routes, but a much more stronger emphasis in the inland Imperial area where much more of the domestic trade is happening. Next slide.
I would like to focus the rest of the presentation now on our work on warehouse and distribution centers. Our region is home to one of the nation's largest concentration of warehousing space with approximately 1.2 billion square feet of building space. These facilities are really a major reason why the region is such a critical mode in the supply chain. Nearly 97% of the 1.2 billion square feet is occupied. The lion's share of the space of facilities are larger than 50,000 square feet. Next slide.
This slide shows the distribution of buildings in each county within the SCAG region by size. You'll notice the predominance of the smaller facilities and although it's not shown here in this slide, also the older facilities are really in Los Angeles County as predicted. For facilities 500,000 square feet and above they're mostly concentrated in the outlying counties of the area, particularly in San Bernardino County. Next slide.
This how the region could accommodate our future demand for warehouse space used on some prevailing trends and I'll go over some of that shortly. We developed a scenario planning tool to diagram the tool on the slide. With insights we've gained from industry interviews, as well as data analyses, the scenario planning tool essentially allows us to forecast growth and logistics activity in the region while also accounting for the limited amount of developable land available for industrial use. The findings are then used to formulate discussion points about how best to shape the region's vision when it comes to growth and logistics. Next slide.
Here some of the revealing trends that we considered for the scenario planning exercise ranging from both historical to some emerging trends. Here historical could be what we see in the growth of mega distribution centers, growth in transloading and cross docking as well as the emerging trends like warehouse automation that we are seeing evolve consistently. Next slide.
Here are some of the data sources that were utilized as well. We purchased CoStar Property data to understand the existing supply and the locations throughout the region. I should note that we had a prior iteration of the study where we mostly focused on using county assessor's data, so in addition to the county assessor's data looking at the proprietary data that we purchased allowed us to desegregate information to a greater level of detail. We also used REMI economic data and GDP forecast, that's really helping us to forecast some of the domestic trade patterns and the need for domestic goods. We also utilize general land-use data from our local jurisdictions as well as I mentioned earlier, freight industry stakeholder interviews and of course very pivotal to all of this is the ports cargo forecast as well. Next slide.
We tested a number of different scenarios as shown here in this slide including a baseline scenario. It uses the current forecast of the port and assumed essentially status quo. No cargo storage efficiency gains over time and no replacement of obsolete warehouses. It assumes warehouse space and functional use mix does not change over time and assumes the current estimates of existing developable space for new facilities. The alternate scenarios we tested beyond the baseline is noted here and are essentially are pretty self- explanatory, all slight variations of some of the prevailing supply-chain trends that we identified. The ones I mentioned earlier including the growth and the transloading efficiency gains from technology, etc. Next slide.
This slide shows the results of the baseline scenario. I'm not going to go into all the scenarios, but the baseline scenario shows total unconstrained 20/40 demand at about 1.8 billion square feet, picking up about 50% from today's 1.2 billion square feet total unconstrained 20/40 demand so we are able to build out at about 1.5 billion square feet to a total shortfall starting as early as 2029 is expected to reach about 295 million square feet of warehouse space by 2040. Bottom-line, regardless of the operational efficiencies to modernize facilities, the region will run out of space at some point before 2040, that's what we are finding. However, depending on some of the variables, the year the region would run out of space really varies. Next slide.
This is my final slide. I think perhaps some of the more important general findings from the study include the implications generated from running many of the alternate scenarios and some of the key discussion points for planning and policy in our region that we have been having discussions with any of our stakeholders and some require further research including many of the points listed here. So the questions listed here become how do we preserve existing land use designation for industrial development and there are various strong competing interests. What consideration should be given to 24/7 operations of these logistics facilities and how do we dedicate impacts? What about vertical growth of logistics facilities that we've seen in other parts of the world? And rapid technology changes of course, this has a huge implication on workforce development particularly for our region where we have emphasized heavily on economic development related to the logistics industry and we rest workforce training to match the skills needed. These are ongoing dialogues that we are having with many of our regional stakeholders and certainly will be critical as we start to plan for our 2020 regional transportation plan. That concludes my presentation. Thank you.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you, Annie. If you have any questions for Annie, please feel free to type them into the chat pod and will get to them after the final presentation. Our final presentation will be given by Chris Bauer, a Senior Transportation Planner at the Capital District Transportation Committee (CDTC). Chris has over 18 years of Transportation Planning experience, from Long Range Planning to Project Development, including working for MPOs, State DOTs, local municipalities, and transit agencies. At CDTC, Chris's duties include managing the Freight Planning program, the Complete Streets Educational & Technical Assistance Workshop Series, several Community Transportation & Land Use Planning Linkage projects, and assisting with development of the Regional Travel Demand Model. He is the Chair of the New York State Association of MPOs (NYSAMPO) Freight Working Group. Chris holds a Bachelor's degree in Urban & Regional Analysis from the University at Buffalo, and is currently pursuing a Master's degree from the University at Albany. He is a member of the American Planning Association and the American Institute of Certified Planners. Chris, I will bring up your presentation and you can go ahead.
Chris Bauer
Thank you, Jennifer and thank you to FHWA for inviting me to speak at today's seminar. I certainly am humbled to have our freight program mentioned in the same breath as the Philadelphia or Los Angeles regions, but I want to tell you more about our freight program here at the Capital District Transportation Committee or CDTC. While I'm not sure you will consider anything I share to be particularly new or innovative, I do think that you will see that you don't have to be a large MPO to engage in effective freight planning. I really should point out that if imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then there's probably a lot of people and agencies flattered by CDTC because we look to the larger MPO's like DVRPC for example and to training opportunities like these Talking Freight seminars for our freight planning ideas. We try to find initiatives that are scalable to our region.
First, let me start by telling you a little bit more about our region. When I say Capital District I'm referring to the capital of New York State. We are a four county region that includes the cities of Albany, Schenectady Troy and Saratoga Springs. Four other small cities for a total of 79 municipalities and a little over 900,000 people. I'm not exactly sure where that puts us in the spectrum of regions, but we usually consider ourselves to be medium-sized. We are located at the intersection of I-787 and I-90 and also the nexus of the Erie Canal, the Champlain Canal and Hudson River, which is Marine Highway 87. We have three class I railroads to operate in the region, as well as several short line and for our high-value time sensitive cargo we have the Albany International Airport. We have a staff of 13, freight planning is designated for one half of one position, which is me. But I can tell you that it ends up being more than half maybe two thirds of my time and there are a few others here who chart hours here and there plenty, but we like to think that we do a lot with the small amount of resources.
I'm going to talk about some of our bigger freight planning initiatives that we undertake and I'm going to try to illustrate how we take the big ideas and aspirational statements all the way down to specifically how those are implemented at the ground level. That starts here at the aspirational level. The CDTC Long Range Transportation Plan, we call that New Visions 2040, and in there we have 12 core principles that we use to guide planning and investment in our region. One of those principles is freight and I pulled some of the language and I'm not going to read it to you but you can see that we recognize the strong connection between freight and economic vitality. We work to make freight more efficient and embrace technological advances. We encourage multimodalism and we always try to take into account any negative impacts that freight might have on local communities.
The cornerstone of our freight program is our freight advisory committee. The committee is made up of representatives from the public and private sectors. We usually have about 20-30 people at each meeting and I'm showing some of the regular attendees on the right side of the slide. Some examples include the Trucking Association of New York, New York State Department of Transportation, the Port of Albany, and the New York Canal Corp. We also have representatives from some of the larger industrial land developers and bigger private sector players who do business in our region, like General Electric and the Golub
Corporation. We also have some participation from the railroads and we are looking for more there. We meet quarterly. We try to have an interesting speaker for each meeting, typically from private industry because it's really the only way that we can learn more about what they do and their challenges and has the added side benefit a lot of times of creating synergies with others on the committee. I guess this is probably a good place to point out that we use a combination of both quantitative and qualitative sources of freight data. We don't have the resources to analyze quantitative data in the same way like maybe DVRPC or SCAG, but I found in our region at least the qualitative stakeholder input from our freight advisory committee is as or maybe more valuable than all of the freight data we collect. We learn a lot about freight issues and potential solutions by talking to those committee members. We also try to do a tour each summer for August meeting and I personally believe that nothing beats getting out and learning about major freight operations and learning more about their challenges. In the past we've visited places like the Erie Canal and the Port of Albany.
Another major component of our freight planning program is our freight priority network. About 8% of our freight in our region moves via truck on the highways and that's a fact we just cannot turn our backs to. The freight priority network is a network of highways, designated to facilitate safe and efficient truck movement. There are three levels of designation based on certain criteria. The first is major, which is essentially your NHS interstate highways. The second is minor, there's mostly state highways, long corridors that connect multiple freight facilities. Then we have connectors, which are your last mile connections to the major freight facilities or clusters of freight at I-70. We re-examine, revise, and then readopt this priority network every five years and again using a combination of quantitative data such as the vehicle class counts, but also qualitative data from our freight advisory committee. If you're interested in more about the criteria, that's available in our freight plan.
I can think of at least two ways that this network has really benefited us. First, we use it as a land-use planning tool and we encourage our members to locate major freight generating facilities or zoning in places that have access to the network. Secondly, it allows us to quickly respond to requests for designated state and national freight networks, like for example the recent designation of the critical urban freight corridors that we had here. We can easily identify the corridors that we consider key for freight movement.
Now I'm going to talk at the ground level where the rubber meets the road, whatever metaphor you like, but this is where freight is specifically integrated into our TIP funding program. For each project we provide our members with a benefit cost ratio and a merit score. The merit scorecard is all the same categories as our New Visions planning principles I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation. It's both a carrot and stick approach so you get points if you improve an MPO or DOT identified issue, if you improve a land-use competitive issue, or if you improve access or travel time on the freight priority network toward a major freight facility. Likewise, you lose points if the project negatively affects a known freight movement issue, or you decrease travel time or reliability along the freight priority network with your introducing a new incompatibility or safety or noise issue.
These are a couple of examples of more significant freight planning initiatives in recent years. The big one was our regional freight plan. We completed that in 2016. In it we identified policies, projects and programs for our region. We updated our freight plan as I mentioned and just as before it really has served us well to have our needs clearly outlined to be able to quickly respond to requests for network designations or when the state freight plan was asking for potential projects that we can quickly respond to those without a lot of staff resources. Another interesting project we developed was a dynamic freight database to estimate freight activity in a partnership with RPI and I will speak more about that in a moment. We done some local origin destination studies that were used to examine the issues. Currently we are developing some freight related local model ordinances related to zoning and land use, this is something that our freight advisory committee identified as a high priority and our members have also indicated interest in addressing the land-use planning and zoning side before the freight facility developer shows up in their planning office. We're trying to develop tools that will help with that.
I want to take a step back and say little more about our relationships with local higher education institutions. Really simply put, our freight program would not be what it is without these partnerships. It greatly increases our technical capacity and it gives them a chance to test innovative ideas in real-world situations. I'm sure a lot of you on the call in the freight planning community know Dr. Jose Holguin-Veras and his team at RPI. We worked with them on the previously mentioned SHRP2 improvement project and we are currently working with them on another project with the Department of Energy looking at energy efficient logistics in the Albany to New York City corridor. We've also acted in advisory roles for various other RPI projects including the initiative selector tool for improving freight system performance that RPI developed. Just to give a little plug for that, if you have not heard of it I suggest you check that out. if you Google RPI initiative selector tool it would probably come up. But it's really pretty neat and worth checking out. It's a great resource.
We also have a really good working relationship with the University at Albany, most notably the work on creating a dashboard to analyze the NPMRDS data in performance measure reporting. I don't like to say that we are lucky to have RPI and the University of Albany in our region but rather I like to say that we are lucky that we are in their region. If you don't already, I encourage you to seek out opportunities to partner with these higher education institutions that might be in your region.
I wanted to take a quick moment to emphasize one way of taking advantage of the situation and say a little bit more about the SHRP2 project. It was a great way to leverage funding and data in a way that was low cost to us here at CDTC. For this, the program was a federal research funding opportunity and intended to examine better ways to collect and analyze and model freight data. In a partnership with RPI we were awarded funding to develop a dynamic freight database. The project utilized a bunch of free data sources like the Commodity Flow Survey and the FAF database, and then we added to that any other freight related data that we were able to get our hands on, like EZPass tolling data and Transearch data on crash statistics. All of the sources were analyzed by the RPI team, they went through a data fusion process and we were able to desegregate the data to show freight activity at the ZIP Code level. What we call the dynamic freight database for us we see this as a precursor to hopefully a regional freight model in the future. We don't model freight right now. It also gives a great understanding of where there are gaps in the data and where we should collect more freight data, so it was really informative in that way. This is the kind of project that we just didn't have the resources and expertise to do on our own and we were able to get it done at a relatively low cost to our organization and it was a way to provide benefits to us and to RPI and I think maybe even to the larger freight planning community.
Finally, I wanted to mention our New York State Association of MPOs freight working group. Like many states we have an association of MPOs and we also have multiple subgroups for various transportation planning topics, including freight. The freight working group meets about quarterly or on an as needed basis and we talk about best practices. We talk about major statewide initiatives like the New York State freight plan. We are there as a freight planning programs. We also try to meet with that group every other year at a major freight facility and in the past there have been some really interesting places, like the Hunts Point food market or the Brooklyn railcar terminal, as well as the Port of Albany here in our region. This group is really a valuable resource for information sharing and I like to think that we help each other. For the smaller MPOs that have a staff of one or two or three people, we try to help them understand what are some of the little things they need to do to do freight planning in their region.
Thank you so much to all of you for listening and I hope you found the information valuable and perhaps you found something that could be applied in your region. I look forward to any questions you have. Thanks.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you, Chris. We are now going to move on to the Q&A session with questions posted online and I encourage you to keep typing in questions, but if we have any time left we will open up the phone line for questions. Chris, I'll start with a question for you since you just finished. For the priority network is the update done concurrent with the metropolitan transportation plan?
Chris Bauer
Yes, actually it was. But I think that was really more by coincidence that we were updating those two things around the same time. We generally like to make sure that our freight priority network and freight plan are in line with our long-range plan and not the other way around, so we would rather back into what we want to see in the long-range plan to the other efforts. But really, I guess it does actually work out where they are on the same schedule.
Jennifer Symoun
Chris, the next question is for you. What role does your state DOT play in your freight program and advisory groups?
Chris Bauer
I think we are lucky because geographically we actually have the state DOT building right next door to us, so we have the statewide representatives right there. We are physically located so close to them that I think we get a lot of participation from them. They are active participants on our freight advisory committee. They are also active participants in the New York State AMPO state working group and at least through the time I've been here we have a pretty close relationship with them.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Chris, there's a comment regarding mitigating the negative impacts. You might be interested in the Northeast Clean Freight Corridors effort that RPI is involved with.
Chris Bauer
Yes, thanks. We are plugged into that with another staff member here who works on our clean cities effort, but thanks, Abby.
Jennifer Symoun
We will move onto questions for you Annie. How did you pick the number and those types of scenarios and how much time did it take to run them all and what variations occurred between them?
Annie Nam
The number of scenarios were really initially just looking at the number of historical trends and to what extent there are significant differences between them because a lot of them actually overlap in many ways and we just looking at the number of emerging trends as well as historical trends. In discussions with stakeholders, we consolidated to the eight scenarios on top of the baselines with a total of nine. It doesn't take very long so it's a simple calculation, but ultimately what we are trying to do is take the module that we created with the data inventory and incorporated it into our heavy-duty trend model. We have a warehouse module and the heavy duty truck model as well. That is something we are currently working on.
Jennifer Symoun
There is a follow-up question. Is this the first time you ran the scenarios and if not, have you compared your prior scenario forecast with current forecasts?
Annie Nam
This is the first time we've run these scenarios. We've done a similar study previously without a scenario planning tool, just a straight baseline forecast so this is the first time.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. I have one more question for Annie and then Mike we will go to you. Do you ever interact with EPA region nine staff who work on reducing emissions from freight operations? And are you familiar with national and state Clean Diesel grants that can help facilities and carriers upgrade equipment with cleaner engines, fuels, shorepower, etc to help reduce impacts and improve acceptance?
Annie Nam
Yes, we do. We definitely work with them, as well as the California air resources as well as our local air-quality district and we partner on numerous initiatives with respect to clean freight technologies.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Mike, we will now move on to questions for you. Mike, do shippers, 3PLs and/or carriers (trucking firms, etc.) use the Freight Finder, and if so, do you know what they use it for? Is it useful for enhancing appreciation of the need to accommodate freight among municipal officials?
Mike Ruane
Yes. We don't have detailed information about who exactly is using our tool, as good as we are getting with data analytics on the web. We don't have that level of detail, but based on our interaction with our partners and stakeholders, the data that we are presenting in PhillyFreightFinder is not necessarily geared towards 3PLs and carriers. There has been a lot of interest from site selection firms and the port authorities as they try to engage shippers or potential shippers in understanding the context of the regional freight network. That also is a big piece of how it's been useful to municipal representatives as well, whether it's county or local municipalities, they generally have an understanding of their internal network, maybe not the detail about the freight relationship that exists, but PhillyFreightFinder has helped them understand the context of their little piece of the region as it relates to the larger regional freight network and economy. That has been useful in helping them maybe better understand and appreciate the freight system.
Jennifer Symoun
Another question for you. This is an impressive data collection and categorization effort. You said it was all done internally - how much time and how many staff were involved? What are their skill sets?
Mike Ruane
In the beginning of the presentation we were building off of 20 years of freight planning experience in the region. For some of the data it was stuff we had done through technical studies over that time to start to create network data information that were built into PhillyFreightFinder, but over the past four years we dedicated roughly a quarter of our freight planning budget to data collection, PhillyFreightFinder enhancements, and other freight data related work. Internally, there are two freight planners, the manager of the Office of Freight Aviation Planning and myself. We are the two that are doing most of the freight work, whether it's technical studies or the freight advisory committee. We also get support from our modeling unit on some of the heavier lift data processing, so we were fortunate enough to get a data improvement grant that really allowed us to step back and redo our data management system, which led to better automation. As far as programming skills, it's really Python and HTML/JavaScript programming, then obviously we have some data management and GIS skills as well on the select team that's been working on this project.
I hope that somewhat answers the question, it's a tough question to answer based on it's been a four or five year effort.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. I think it was Paul who asked that if you have any clarification, feel free to type that in. Like Paul said, it was a great answer. We have a question for all of the presenters, can you talk about your MPO's approach to designating Critical Urban Freight Corridors/Critical Rural Freight Corridors?
Chris Bauer
Sure. I don't know the experience of everyone in other states, I know that when we got the request from our New York State DOT they mention that there was a really limited number of miles that were going to be divvied up for the urban freight corridors and as I mentioned in the presentation, we really just went directly to our freight priority network and picked off of there what we thought was appropriate. I know that the DOT received way more miles than they had to allocate, but did not really feel necessary to rank one over another. We felt we had been through that process and we are going to leave that up to them. I don't believe in New York State that network has been designated yet.
Annie Nam
Actually, ours is still ongoing. It's a much more coordinated process amongst a number of the MPO's throughout the state of California, along Caltrans. We are taking a much more strategic approach as mentioned earlier. This limitation in the total number of miles, I think California in total got 300 miles for the designation, so if you can imagine the number of people involved in trying to do the designation with a much more strategic approach. Because you need the designation for funding requirements for access to the formula funds, we're going through a process currently with our California transportation commission with the formula that is being more competitively granted, so depending on the outcomes of that we will start identifying the critical urban freight corridors. It is currently an ongoing process.
Mike Ruane
We had two processes because we have two states we are working with on the critical urban and rural freight corridors. I think regionally our approach was to use the knowledge we had based on the data that we have collected to identify the current gaps in what we would call our designated freight network that we thought were not being recognized in the national network. Then we did some data analysis on each of those lower-level routes to better understand the demands on those. Then we conducted outreach for feedback on each of those corridors, recognizing that we would not get the full mileage for all those corridors. We took the eligible corridors and submitted them to the DOTs, and based on the different state processes, Pennsylvania is still ongoing, New Jersey has submitted. What we submitted and identified statewide is eligible critical urban freight corridors and are for long-term if the mileage were to ever shift.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, thank you. Another question that I will put out to everyone, how are the panelists' agricultural regions dealing with seasonal freight congestion, and associated freight congestion relief approaches?
Chris Bauer
I guess I will jump in, this is Chris. For us, it's not huge, agriculture is not a major part of freight movement here. It's only in upstate New York but in our region it is just different commodities besides agriculture and we just don't have a peak season that constrains the network in way that it requires attention. We are mindful of the agricultural seasons we've got. In parts of our region certainly there's some implications to that, however it's not something we have been focusing on pretty heavily. I don't know that I can really comment to that.
Jennifer Symoun
Another question for all presenters. This is briefly mentioned during a couple of presentations, but how much coordination do you do with other MPOs in your region, like SANDAG (San Diego) or maybe Phoenix in SCAG's case, or NJTPA and NYMTC and/or BMC (North Jersey/New York and/or Baltimore) in DVRPC's case, or maybe even Boston in CDTC's case, in addition to the MPOs in your own state?
Annie Nam
This is Annie. We have a pretty close collaborative relationship with SANDAG. Especially given the fact that we also have cross-border issues. I think there's a tremendous amount of coordinated planning that happens within the jurisdictions, but also statewide this has been collaborative, having various dialogues with initiatives with the number of MPOs throughout the state.
Mike Ruane
This is Mike speaking about DVRPC's efforts. We try to work closely with the neighboring MPOs as much as we can on freight issues. The freight advisory committee gets attendance from WILMAPCO and NJTPA in North Jersey, and the South Jersey TPO. We would like to keep them at the table. We are also reaching out when we can and staying involved with some of the mega-regional conversations trying to participate in the MAP Forum which is centered around New York City, especially as it relates to freight issues because the Port of New York/New Jersey has impacts on our region. Then as much as we can at the state levels working with MPOs and making sure that we are identifying opportunities to work together and address issues across our borders.
Chris Bauer
This is Chris. I think we do a really good job of coordinating with other MPOs in New York State. You can see in my presentation that we have some collaborative projects that involve other entities. We only have one MPO that touches our boundary and we coordinate closely with them obviously because they are so close to us. I don't think we do a great job of coordinating with our neighboring states of Vermont and Massachusetts and other than just perhaps at least from a freight perspective those boundaries of those states to us are pretty rural. There is not a lot of inertia or whatever or impetus to coordinate more with them.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. It looks like we've gotten to all the questions that have been taken so I'm going to give people a chance if they would like to ask question over the phone. Greg can you can give instructions on how to ask questions over the phone?
Operator
If you like to ask a question over the phone, please signal by pressing star one on your telephone keypad. That is star one for any questions over the phones at this time. No questions over the phone line right now.
Jennifer Symoun
All right, great. If f we don't have any more questions then we will go ahead and close out for the day. If you think of anything last minute, feel free to type it in. Thank you all for attending today's seminar. The recorded version of this event will be available within the next few weeks on the Talking Freight website. Information will be sent soon about the January Talking Freight seminar. The Freight Planning LISTSERV is the primary means of sharing information about upcoming seminars. I encourage you to join the Freight Planning LISTSERV if you have not already done so. Happy holidays and a happy new year!
