Jennifer Seplow:
Good afternoon or good morning to those of you to the West. Welcome to the Talking Freight Seminar Series. My name is Jennifer Seplow and I will moderate today's seminar. Today's topic is Goods Movement: Urban Case Studies. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded.
Today we'll have three speakers: John Friebele, of the City of San Antonio, Texas; Jerry Robbins of the San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic, and Marsha Anderson Bomar of Street Smarts.
John Friebele currently serves as the Traffic Engineer for the City of San Antonio where he has been employed since 1996. He has a total of 32 years of professional experience including 12 prior years of employment in the private sector as a consulting engineer in the Dallas area and has served in traffic engineering positions in the City of Austin and the City of Garland where he was Director of Traffic and Transportation. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University with a Bachelors and Masters of Science in Civil Engineering. During his college years he was employed as a Research Assistant with the Texas Transportation Institute where he was engaged primarily in Freeway Operations research. He is a registered professional engineer in the State of Texas and is a certified Professional Traffic Operations Engineer. He is a 30+ year member of the Institute of Transportation Engineers and is a member of the Public Agency Council and chairs a committee of the Goods Movement Council. He is currently the President of TexITE, District 9 of ITE, and has actively served in this organization for the past 30 years.
Jerry Robbins is a Transportation Planner with the City of San Francisco. He currently works in the Traffic Engineering Division of the city's Department of Parking and Traffic, where he is involved in wide-range of transportation issues including downtown traffic, transit and parking operations; special event planning and reviewing development proposals.
Mr. Robbins has Masters Degree in Urban Planning from the University of Washington and has twenty five years of experience in transportation planning. He is a member of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) and the Institute's Goods Movement Council. He is also a member of the American Planning Association and the American Institute of Certified Planners.
Marsha Anderson Bomar formed Street Smarts in 1990. Street Smarts is a transportation planning and engineering consulting firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. She had the honor of being the first woman to serve as International President of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). Other affiliations include the Transportation Research Board, Intelligent Transportation Society of Georgia, Women's Transportation Seminar, The Council for Quality Growth and the Society of Women Engineers. Ms. Anderson Bomar also serves as a Girl Scout and a Boy Scout leader.
Ms Anderson Bomar's Master's thesis was on Regulations Impacting Urban Goods Movement in the Garment District in NYC, published in 1975. Since that time she has been the Scholar in Residence at the American Trucking Associations, a director of the New Jersey Motor Truck Association, on the Goods Movement Committee for the Atlanta Olympic Games and conducted extensive research in this arena.
Ms. Anderson Bomar holds a Bachelor and a Masters degrees from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in Mathematics and Transportation Planning and Engineering, respectively. She also holds a Masters of Civil Engineering with a concentration in Transportation from Princeton University. She is the author of more than two hundred publications and studies. Ms. Anderson Bomar is listed in numerous Who's Who publications, including "Professional and Executive Women", in the "South and Southwest", "in the East", and "Among Community Leaders".
I'd like to go over a few logistical details prior to starting the seminar. Today's seminar will last 90 minutes, with 60 minutes allocated for the speakers, and the final 30 minutes for audience Question and Answer. The Operator will give you instructions on how to ask a question over the phone during the Q&A period. However, if during the presentations you think of a question, you can type it into the smaller text box underneath the chat area on the lower right side of your screen. Please make sure you are typing in the thin text box and not the large white area. Presenters will be unable to answer your questions during their presentations, but I will use some of the questions typed into the chat box to start off the question and answer session in the last half hour of the seminar. Those questions that are not answered will be posted to the Freight Planning LISTSERV. The LISTSERV is an email list and is a great forum for the distribution of information and a place where you can post questions to find out what other subscribers have learned in the area of Freight Planning. If you have not already joined the LISTSERV, the web address at which you can register is provided on the slide on your screen.
If at anytime you would like to zoom in on the slide that is showing on your screen, you can click on the zoom icon at the top of your screen. It looks like a magnifying glass with a plus sign in it.
Finally, I would like to remind you that this session is being recorded. A file containing the audio and the visual portion of this seminar will be posted to the Talking Freight Web site within the next week. To access the recorded seminar, please visit Talkingfreight.webex.com and click on the "recorded events" link on the left side of the page and then choose the session you'd like to view. Due to the size of the file, recorded files are available for viewing/listening purposes only and cannot be saved to your own computer. We encourage you to direct others in your office who may have not been able to attend this seminar to access the recorded seminar.
The PowerPoint presentations used during the seminar will also be available within the next week. I will notify all attendees of the availability of the PowerPoints, the recording, and a transcript of this seminar.
At this point, we're going to wait a few minutes and then we'll start at 1:00 with the first presentation of the day. We're just going to give a few more people time to join in. Everybody sit tight for a few minutes and we'll be back at 1:00.
Operator:
I would like to turn the presentation over to Jennifer. Please receive, ma'am.
J. Seplow:
Thank you. Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's seminar. Today's topic is goods movement urban case studies. Our first presentation of the day will be that of John Friebele of the city of San Antonio, Texas. If you think of questions during this presentation or during any of the other presentations, please type them into the chat area on the screen. These questions will be answered in the last 30 minutes of the seminar. If you give me a send, I will turn it over to you, John, and you can get started. Okay. You can begin.
John Friebele:
Good morning or afternoon, everybody, however the case may be. My name is John Friebele, and as Jennifer said, I'm the traffic engineer with the city of San Antonio, and have been here for about the last almost nine years. Today, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what I've termed the issues and challenges of curb-side loading and parking in urban areas. The primary issue that I -- that's based on my experience and also the experience of others, if what I've heard is correct, is the major issues or supplies supply, and supply. That basic, the demands for curb-side loading and unloading and parking at various types exceed the supply that's out there. One of the major issues I think that needs to be identified, determined on a local basis is how the various types of regulations that we typically see in an urban area are distributed around, particularly the central business district. We have a great number of different and competing demands for use of on-street curb space, some of them which are listed here which also happens to include but which is not listed the use of the street as travel lanes, which I think sometimes is taken for granted by a lot of folks. And as we decrease the street capacity for reasons of parking, on-street parking, or other reasons, then all of a sudden our problems shift one of the issues also is how do we -- how much space for each need, each one of these uses is sufficient or what's fair? Do we actually go about determining demand on an overall use by use basis, or do we react to demand? And I would probably say that at least, in my case, and I'm sure other folks' cases that because the supply is limited then we're simply reacting to demands of the moment by the redistribution of curb-side parking space. And that would get into how is the distribution of space determined? Is there a pro-active method or do we do it reactively, which is primarily my situation in San Antonio. There's very little science, I guess, for quantifying or statistically distributing the various types of curb use to the various types of demands. One of the things that has come to my attention as a possibility is the use of geographic information systems to identify the potential needs based on land uses and allocate what space on the street has been identified with respect to those land uses, and this would be a method, I guess, of proactively determining the equitable distribution of the various uses. Another major issue is how much travel lane capacity can you afford to give up to curb parking? Be it for loading and unloading activities, passenger loading, taxicab stands, bus stops, things of that sort. Also, is this going to be a full-time, 24-hour, 24/7 type of issue for the use of the curb space or can that curb space be allocated to different uses during different times of the day? For instance, travel lane during the peak periods and parking lane during the off-peak periods. Another issue that I guess has come in to the mix and has complicated how we used to, anyway, distribute curb space for the various parking demands is preferential parking policies. That has a lot to do with the issues, and its effect right off the top on the overall supply. Now, I'm just giving you all issues and concerns and things that I know myself and other folks have expressed. I don't have any answers. Hopefully, we will have some answers beginning with some of the ITE goods movement council, work that's going to be going on here and I will talk about it a little bit more further in this presentation. Another issue that comes up is enforcement. Enforcement of the curb use. Many of our curb uses for loading zones or parking, parking meters is time limited in an effort to encourage greater turnover. This almost demands that we have active human enforcement regulating the use of this issuing citations for violation of parking regulations, enforcement, of course, has the consequences of cost and its overall effectiveness and perception by the public, getting a parking ticket at any time does not make a person happy. San Antonio is a large tourist destination, which also pays a good part of my salary, so I'm certainly aware of tourism's needs and wants. But tourist getting a ticket does not give them a good perception of the city of San Antonio. Also, some of our enforcement actions have actually developed or created stake holders or interests that we didn't know we had before, and just as an example, all of a sudden we had the AFL and CIO as stakeholders, or people who wanted to express particular opinions about how we handled our downtown curb parking situation, and particularly the enforcement, and that came about as a result of us enforcing commercial loading zone regulations where they park too long, which was a non-moving violation, but it really raised their eye when we started issuing moving citations for parking in travel lanes so they could make a delivery, this is particularly applicable to things to folks like ups, fed-ex, the delivery services, which was a moving violation, went on the driver's record, and had a distinct impact on whether or not these drivers remained as employees of the delivery service, and being unionized, that came to our front and in a loud manner, something I wish we hadn't had to face but we ended up having to, simply because of our efforts in enforcement. Some other issues that some folks are taking for granted nowadays but many of us are just getting in to, is the actual value pricing of our on-street, or curb parking supply. What kind of prices can we charge for what uses to encourage turnover and to create greater equity out on the street. Another issue is the public parking supply, on street and off street, versus the private supply. San Antonio, and particularly in its off-street parking, has an issue where our relative rates, our rates are fairly low, and therefore, the private supply is sort of forced to match our low rates, much to their detriment in order to compete successfully. The major issues is the active management on street parking. Many cities, several cities, have active departments or divisions within the city that are on a continuous basis. It's their sole job to manage, enforce and pro actively try to match supply versus demand. Many other cities, and again, I will reference San Antonio, have the situation where the active management is a part-time thing, shared with a great number of other duties. One of the issues also, how much space can we use is how do we put vehicles on the street, the parking design, angle or parallel parking, which has a distinct impact on supply, safety and capacity of the roadway. Stakeholder involvement and input is an issue here which I'm sure it is, many other places where a great number of organizations including downtown business associates and, like I just referenced, some unions, the chambers of commerce, the restaurant associations, the hotel groups, all have their own opinion on how we ought to be issuing, managing, distributing, what available space there is, and in many places, it's the type of thing where it's sort of like juggling four balls with two hands, you better be good at it or you will be dropping something. The challenges, I guess the major challenges I see is to strive to provide a situation where supply is at least equal to the demand for the various types of issues in the various areas of the downtown area. This has a direct interaction on stakeholders' satisfaction, which may or may not be equivalent to the traffic engineers' satisfaction. And I say that because the traffic engineer's trying move persons and goods across the street, and many times the capacity of the street is being preempted from a non-technical standpoint for other uses, such as curb-side parking. I mentioned earlier that there are some efforts right now to try to get some basic information on how different people are doing different things in regard to curb-side parking and the goods movement council and parking council are co sponsoring a project on downtown parking management. It's titled downtown curbside parking management, and I am currently the chair of the committee, who has not really to this point been able to advance it but it will be here over the next few months, certainly. The scope of this is to determine predominant issues of curbside use and research parking policies in a representative cross section of downtowns to determine successful parking and management facilities. The end result of this is to try to offer practitioners a best practices on how they might consider going about providing the demand or meeting the demand for downtown parking and also the organizational aspects of actively managing the parking. As I said, the downtown curb-side parking management committee, we're going to be looking at surveying representative cities, compiling existing practices and policies, and formulate a written best practices for distribution within the industry . I am the chairman of it. And anybody who's interested in participating on this, or wanting to know what the status is can contact me. My e-mail address is here on the slide. It's probably ready available through the city of San Antonio ITE links. This pretty much completes my presentation and I would be pleased to answer any questions at the time that questions are entertained. Thank you very much for your attention.
J. Seplow:
Thank you, John. Again, I do want to remind everybody if you do have questions, please type them into the chat area. Please indicate who your question is directed to and also send your questions to all participants in the dropdown box at the bottom that allows you to send -- allows you to choose who to send it to.
Our next presentation is Jerry Robbins. Jerry, let me get you set up and then you can begin in a minute.
Jerry Robbins:
Greetings from San Francisco. My presentation is on downtown pickup and delivery. I'm going to follow a lot of the themes that John talked about with some specific examples from here in San Francisco. Also going to talk about situations that may be unique to San Francisco in California. A little bit of background on San Francisco. It's at the end of a peninsula, it's surrounded by water, three sides which contain the growth and if we're going to grow, we're going to grow up rather than out. Population in 2000 was about 777,000 people. It's one of the denser, more transit and pedestrian orientated cities in the United States. We have relatively light or less auto ownership that a lot of cities on the other hand because of our density, we think we have more vehicles per square mile than any city in the country and perhaps the world. So we are a transit-orientated city but we also have a lot of cars and parking issues. A little bit of background on downtown San Francisco -- it was laid out with fairly narrow streets, 40 to 50 feet wide, we don't have a lot of alleys that can be used for freight loading. We have a limited parking supply. We have a lot of downtown employment. We're about the 6th largest downtown in the United States in terms of employment. Our -- we have a transit first policy which discourages the development of off-street parking in the downtown area in favor of use of transit and other modes of transportation. Off-street parking is not required for new office buildings in the downtown area and the policy seems to work. About 60% of downtown employees use transit to work. Only about 20% drive alone to work. We also have a 25% parking tax, which raises the cost of parking and the slide shown here shows a fairly steep price of parking downtown at this slide shows. It's 2.50 for 15 minutes. All-day parking generally runs about $30 a day. So the policy works but it puts an awful lot of pressure on the downtown parking supply that we do have, and there's a lot of illegal parking that takes place as a result of our parking policies and supply. The particular problems I wanted to talk about today, we have a lot of off-street loading docks that are not as effective as they could be. Secondly, we have many on-street spaces that are occupied by non-delivery vehicles, and that leads to the third problem of delivery vehicles frequently double parking and congesting traffic and delaying transit operations. On the off-street side, this picture shows an off-street loading dock that was developed probably in the 1960s or 1970s. They were not required at all for new buildings built before 1957. The dimensions for many of the zones are not that good. A lot of them, the planning code, which is where the off-street parking regulations lie, requires that they be just 35 feet deep and in many cases only 12 feet high, which is not large enough to accommodate a semi trailer, and I think the picture shown here if you look closer, it shows the vertical clearance way in the back is 12 feet, 6 inches. The result of a loading -- of the loading docks slide on the left, we have a semi trailer parked in a zone blocking the sidewalk and one lane of traffic and forcing a bus to drive on the wrong side of the road. The slide on the right shows the off-street loading dock being used for a trash compacter. I think when this building was developed, we probably didn't have trash compactors but this is a big problem, at least here in San Francisco. The dock that was developed with the idea that would be used for truck loading is instead used for something else. Trash storage. Here's some additional problems. This is a fairly well-designed dock. It's deeper than 35 feet and has good vertical clearance but seems to be used for catch-all purposes. There's a trash compacter in the back. There's personal vehicles. There's recycling containers and then they also marked it as the disabled parking space for the building. The picture on the right shows a fairly well-designed off-street loading dock but it doesn't get used because the building operator doesn't open the door for some reason, perhaps for security reasons. Here we see simultaneous -- excuse me -- simultaneous shots of loading docks both inside and outside. Again, it's a well-designed dock on the left. It's got good size but it's not being used for the trucks. It's being used for the personal vehicles and the results, the slide on the right, we have double-parked trucks and people rolling the goods in rather than being able to access the building directly. Our department has the responsibility for on-street parking enforcement with our parking control officers, but they do not have the authority to go inside the buildings and cite vehicles on private property for parking in the loading docks. So we need to work with our planning department and we've had some success in getting their cooperation and contacting the billing owners and asking them to -- building owners and asking them to use the zones properly. We asked that for new buildings that the building provide a plan of where they will store their garbage and their recycling, so this is something that gets considered in the development of the building rather than treated as an afterthought. On the other hand, it's fairly complicated for the planning department to cite violations in a loading dock. It's not as simple as issuing a parking ticket out on the street. It's a problem we're still working on.
So if the trucks can't get into the off-street loading dock or in the building doesn't have an off-street loading dock, they will be parking on the street. This slide shows a typical on-street loading space in California. We paint the curbs yellow and we sign the zone as clearly as we can to try to send a message that only commercial vehicles are allowed to park in these zones. In California, a commercial vehicle is defined as a vehicle designed or used primarily for the transportation of property and that includes pick-up trucks, vans, station wagons, SUVs, conceivably are eligible for commercial license plates, and as John mentioned, we have a 30-minute time limit on these zones to try to emphasize that the space needs to turn over several times during the day. Some of the problems that we have in on-street loading zones, the biggest one is the issue of nondelivery vehicles parked in the freight zones. This has been a problem for many, many years in San Francisco building contractors, tradesmen who work in buildings like electricians, plumbers, painters, office machine repairers don't have easy access to parking downtown. They have commercial plates. They frequently park in these zones and stay quite a while. It takes more than 30 minutes to go in and paint somebody's office. So this is a battle we're dealing with on an on-going basis. The photo on the right shows a limousine, which is a fairly new feature in San Francisco. We have quite a large fleet of limousines that have emerged. This driver is relaxing with his limousine parked in a freight loading zone while the truck that's trying to make a delivery is forced to double-park. Slide on the left similarly the SUV may have commercial plates parked in the freight loading zone, not doing any loading. Slide on the right shows a passenger van and a sports car parked in the delivery zone and the truck is double-parked alongside them. This results in double-parking and traffic congestion which just showed a few examples of that here. The one on the left, the truck is double parked just adjacent to the intersection so when the light changes to green, the two lanes of traffic have to proceed single file. A lot of people say why don't you go in and cite all of those double-parked trucks and that will solve the problem but it really doesn't solve the problem. In California, commercial vehicles can legally double-park or park more than 18 inches from the curb if it's reasonably necessary to accomplish the loading or unloading of merchandise which means that they can't get to the curb. They are allowed to double-park while they are actively leading and unloading. I'm curious if that's the case in other states around the country or if this is something unique to California.
We've taken a variety of measures to accommodate the large demand for freight loading downtown. John talked about part-time loading zones and traffic lanes and that's what's shown in the slide on the left. It's a tow-away zone during the morning and evening peaks. But it's designated for freight loading during the day. The picture on the right shows a space that's designated for truck loading Monday through Friday but for general parking on Saturdays. We don't have a whole lot of freight loading demand on Saturdays. Some years back, in an effort to keep some of the nonfreight delivery vehicles from parking in the loading zones, we instituted a second type of loading zone called a special truck loading zone. Although the word truck isn't specifically defined in the state vehicle code, it does define station wagons so the city of San Francisco set up a new type of loading zone, which is -- which does not allow station wagons but does allow other types of commercial vehicles. So that's shown in this slide. We paint those curbs a little bit differently. We paint them yellow and black and station wagons are prohibited from parking in those zones. Unfortunately, it -- a van or an SUV that has commercial plates would be allowed to park in those zones. Another measure we took in the 1980 to try to increase turnover in the loading zone was to put parking meters in there. The rationale for this was to make it easier to cite violators if the parking enforcement officer -- if there's no parking meter, the officer has to chalk the tires and come back before the citation can be issued. With the parking meter, the idea was if the meter was expired, they could issue the citation immediately. One of hang ups was the companies did not want to give cash to their drivers. Another measure that was taken over the years is to increase the fine for parking more than 30 minutes or parking illegally in the zones. We've recently raised it from did 30 to $50. Didn't seem to deter this person who has four citations. A lot of people I think are able to write it off as a cost of doing business or in some other way avoid paying the ticket. A little stronger measure that definitely is very effective is to tow violators out of the zones. It's very inconvenient and expensive to retrieve your car after it's been towed. On the other hand, John referred to stakeholder interests. You do get a lot of gripes and complaints about being towed. It's very inconvenient. One of the things we've done most recently is, again, to try to eliminate pickups, vans and SUV's that are not making freight deliveries is to create a third type of loading zone which is available only to trucks with six or more wheels. And that's shown in this slide. It's designed to prevent SUVs and vans, as I said. We had a lot of input from the teamsters union in locating these. And they are very pleased to see we're doing this. They tend to drive the larger trucks. We did get complaints from other companies that are delivering freight from four-wheel vehicles and we're trying to work it out so that companies that are making legitimate deliveries could have access to these and other zones and yet we could hopefully still restrict the non-delivery vehicles. Some other approaches, the slide at the top shows the new type of parking meter we're installing in San Francisco. It accepts a debit card for payment in addition to accepting coins. This is something that's being developed by our MPO. The card would work not only in parking meters but would also be accepted by transit operators in the bay area. While the parking meter is ready to use the card, the card is still in the development stage. It's fairly complicated, apparently, to make it work for so many different operations. Another regulation that was put in fairly recently is to institute a double parking fine for double parking -- or double fine for double parking on certain streets, primarily transit streets in the downtown area. It's only in effect during the morning and evening peak periods, as shown here. Some other things that we've considered but not adopted, we often get the suggestion why don't you restrict trucks in the downtown area or make them come in at night. That was something we studied a couple of years ago and was not at all popular with the delivery companies or with the receivers. Most downtown office buildings are pretty much empty after 6 and they don't have anybody there to accept the freight. The unions felt is was going to raise their cost and that proposal did not get very far. I know in New York, they've been very successful with pay and display meters with debit cards. In conclusion, number one, our off-street loading docks, are not always very effective. We're working on better coordination with our planning department to get better enforcement of those zones. Secondly, we need vigilant enforcement of on-street freight loading zones to keep non-delivery vehicles out of these zones. Finally, we need to do a better job of finding parking for contractors so they don't have to park in the freight delivery zones.
J. Seplow:
Our final presentation of today will be that of Marsha Anderson Bomar of Streetsmarts.
Marsha Anderson Bomar:
Good afternoon and good morning to those on the west coast. My presentation today will be a little bit different. I think -- in the Atlanta area we'll be starting at a broader perspective and toward the end of my presentation, I will talk about some of the things that are happening at the very localized urban center of Atlanta. But there's a great deal happening that affects urban goods movement that's happening at a much broader scale in the metro area. For those of you who may not be familiar with the area, we have a lot of things happening all at the same time. We have four major interstates, two that are relatively north and south. They form an x that crosses right in the middle of downtown Atlanta. We have an east/west highway that crosses just to the south of the center of town and then we have a perimeter road, a ring road known as I-285 that plays a very important role from a goods movement perspective around the Atlanta metropolitan area. We also have a lot of varying truck restrictions on different roadways that affect how the freight transportation can move around the metro area. We have a large number of counties, the state of Georgia is broken up into 159 counties and depending upon which day of the week it is and where we are in our various assessments, up until not too long ago, the metro area was considered to be a 13-county area. Now I believe we're up to a 19 or 20-county area that's considered part of the Atlanta metro area. And there are other metropolitan areas nearby and it has, in some direction, the appearance that metro areas will start to touching very soon. That in and of itself creates a lot of activity. We have two major railroads that have facilities both in town and a little bit further out of town. When I say town, I mean the city of Atlanta. That creates a lot of the subsequent truck activity. We have as many of you know one of the busiest airports in the world and a lot of the activity at the airport is cargo activity. Some of that results in truck activity on the local roadways. Quite a bit of it does. We also have an interesting situation. Although we are a five or a six-hour drive from the port of savannah, the port itself promotes its value to the community by promoting that it is an overnight trip to Atlanta. So it creates a lot of very time sensitive truck activity from the coast into the city of Atlanta. As you can tell, there are a lot of things happening and as a result, a lot of focus has come to bear on what do we do with all of these trucks and truck activities? I moved to the Atlanta area about 21 years ago, and at that time, the focus was much more on the urban side truck loading docks, issues similar to what John and Jerry mentioned in more recent years. In the early part of 2000, the Department of Transportation began looking at a broader perspective in terms of the interstate system and the flow of traffic throughout the state. The truck traffic throughout the state. A number of other organizations have also joined in and I will talk more as I go through my presentation about the variety of activities that are -- have occurred and are occurring in the metro area with respect to freight movement. Let's see -- freight movement. Let's see. In 2001, the Georgia Department of Transportation at the behest of the state transportation board initiated a study of hourly truck movements, primarily focusing on the intrastate system. It was a very expansive study that involved a lot of local governments at all levels. It -- it very much involved the trucking industry and related partners. It involved the communications office at the Georgia Department of Transportation. Many other departments planning as well as engineering in the DOT as a result of the study that was conducted, a strategy guidebook was developed. The study was different from many other studies that are conducted, in that the focus was not on developing models and some of the more traditional planning approaches, but rather to identify very implementable strategies that various partners DOT or other entities was in the metro area could and promote and move forward to help solve problems that are being experienced around the metro area. We had a lot of different agencies represented in that effort, and the end result was a little bit -- a few more than about 70 implementable strategies that are detailed. Each one in the guidebook is written up as a one-page script in the final report for the project there's a lot more details included. But in the guidebook, it was really intended to present almost like you would think of a cookbook, a one-page write up that gives enough detail on the nature of the strategy, who the champions might be, a relative cost of implementing the strategy. The benefits, the constraints, and we also included some information about the geographic reach of the particular strategy because we thought that would be useful. Having that many strategies in place, it was felt that they really needed to be divided up into manageable category so that different groups could focus in on just the strategies that really suited the nature of their organization. So for example, the Georgia Department of Transportation operations group is very much focused on its and other engineers type strategies and I will talk more about that in a minute. The Atlanta Regional Commission and others who are involved in plan pg activities can focus in on the planning type strategies. In addition to breaking the strategies down into these categories, they were also prioritized using a lot of input from very stakeholder groups, the team, and the Georgia Department of Transportation, so that we -- the results strategies are divided up by category and then into tiers. Tier one being the things that either were felt to be needed the soonest implementable, the soonest or of great importance but needing additional study so that they -- so that the study part should happen very soon so that implementation of the background can begin in a timely fashion. Working with the Georgia Department of Transportation, a number of strategies were identified for their consideration, for their ability to move forward. Some of those include the enhancements the Georgia Department of Transportation has a remarkable system that is centered at their transportation management center, that includes a wide variety of technology based an other solutions to addressing traffic issues, including a very extensive camera system both in the metro area and in other parts of the state, a very significant web site that provides a lot of information, relationships with many of the media outlets to provide that information on a broader basis, and highway hero system and on and on. And it was felt that one of the things that could be done to both enhance their system and also provide more opportunity for managing the truck traffic was to create a truck only section of the navigator web site and then move some of those pieces into other aspects of their system. Some additional work has been done on that and that is being incorporated into the DOT's plan for implementation for the growth of their system. There are a number of other strategies that the DOT has the high priority. During the course of the study, it became obvious that some of the signage was very confusing. Just the language of where the trucks should be. There are truck lane restrictions and in the course of about a 40-mile combined stretch of the various interstates around the metro area, there were eight different signs trying to say virtually the same thing. So the department went through a process and refined their signage and replaced a lot of signage to make the message more clear to the truck driver and the rest of the motoring public as to where the trucks were supposed to be in the system. There are a number of other strategies that they are -- that DOT is now advancing. In addition to the Georgia DOT components, the Atlanta commission represented by some of their staff was very active in the stakeholder group for the Georgia DOT truck study. During the course of the study, they took the initiative to form a freight task force which has been very active for about two years now and has been very focused on making sure there are real things happening that will benefit the truck community and the good movement community. Specifically as they've gone through their process, they identified very, very specific projects that would be truck -- considered truck friendly, intersections and interchanges to bring to the forefront and to give higher priority in this for the region. A number of interchanges have been looked for improvement because some components of our system are quite old and we're having a lot of trouble with trucks rolling over as any exit the interstate. So the Georgia Department of Transportation and the trucking industry have been working very specifically on what they can do and they've been making some modifications to the smaller interchanges. The one that I've broken out here is a very major interchange and is very intensely used by truck traffic because of the number of industrial areas that surround this change. [ please stand by ]
Most messages that they need to post are day-time messages. Occasionally they can have construction at night where they need to post message, but generally they don't have high priority messages that they had need to post at night. Trucking industry has a lot of their activity happening in the overnight hours. And so the two have come together to look at what messages are most appropriate, particularly for safety reasons to communicate to the trucking industry and right now a menu of those messages are being developed as a collaborative effort, and some testing will be done on those messages and some -- some analysis will be done in the future to look at the effectiveness of those messages. I mentioned earlier we do have a perimeter road, I-285 that goes around the metropolitan area. The truck drivers who do not have an origin or destination inside the perimeter are required to use -- I'm sorry. Are required to drive on the perimeter road and not cut straight through town even though their trip may be taking them from the due northwest to due southeast. They still have to go around the perimeter road, and one of the observations that was made repeatedly in the stake holder group, was a lot of times that information was not prominently displayed to the truck drivers who were not particularly familiar with the area and they got the information too late to cross over several lanes of traffic and go where they were supposed to go. So that is, for example, one type of message that will be displayed on this changeable message signs to make sure that they know where they are supposed to be. You can see there are all in of other project, the Georgia Department of Transportation is finishing up a state-wide plan that does include truck transportation, the Atlanta commission is working with the data that they've recently acquired to look at that they can glean out of that and what tools they can build for future analyses. As I said, coming out of the freight advisory task force, there's been the identification of some priorities and one is of particular interest that I will -- that I would like to highlight and talk about for just a moment. Sometimes it's very difficult to open a conversation in an area where there is a lot of demand for a very limited amount of capacity and you've heard that message from the other two speakers as well. In this case, we have a tremendous amount of in particular truck traffic that moves in a particular area within the metropolitan area. There's a lot of truck traffic everywhere, but the green crescent that you see is an area that embraces boat railroads, a lot of industrial areas, the airport, and a lot of distribution facilities and warehouses. And so it's very, very, very early in the conversation but there has been the opening of a discussion as to whether there ought to be a more direct connection in that crescent area because right now, in order to get from the western most part of that area to the eastern most part of that area, the trucks at ally have to drive due east on one interstate, go around the perimeter road, then drive south on another interstate and in some cases they may have some other movements that they have to do but it puts them in the midst of all of the other very intense traffic activity in the metro area. So the freight community has come together and there's space, it's still not an overly developed land area, is there a place where a road could be developed that that maybe could be a freight only road, a truck only road, maybe not, that could effect these various components in a more logical and focus the fashion so we can accomplish both a better transportation system for the freight community and create more capacity by removing those trucks from the other interstate. Interesting idea. As I mentioned, the TIP is in the process of being approved. It does focus very largely in one section on freight transportation and I think in the scheme of TIPs I think that's highly commendable and somewhat unique that projects are viewed as being very beneficial for the transportation system as a whole and are highlighted in the plan. The traffic operations primarily at the department of transportation in some of the larger counties in the metro area are doing a lot of different things to make the system work better but regularly coming back to the issue of trucks and how do they fit in and how can we help them be part of the solution, not the problem. We have a lot of things happening with respect to incident management with respect to the paths that trucks can travel because sometimes they encounter bridge restrictions or interchange restrictions where they know that certain interchanges are much less truck-friendly than others. So there's a lot of smaller improvements being looked at that will help improve their mobility in the region. The Georgia transportation authority in conjunction with the Georgia DOT and other partners are looking at a variety of toll-type facilities. One of the things that they are looking at right now are truck-only toll lanes. The Georgia Department of Transportation is also looking at carry doors that may warrant truck only lanes or at least the development of some corridors that are more truck-friendly. The original commission is getting ready to lead a study that will look at more detail at the urban part of the goods movement process and some tools needed to understand and manage that a little bit better. The Georgia Department of Transportation continues to fund individual tasks that are implementing some of the strategies that were put forward in the strategy guidebook that I mentioned at the beginning. There's not as much happening in the -- what I would consider the pure urban goods movement arena. As you've heard from John and Jerry, although you can see we do have some needs for that to be addressed, the picture in the upper left-hand side is actually in a parking lot where there's a strip center with a few out parcels and obviously, in designing this, nobody realized or thought about or cared that the trucks didn't have a loading dock. They just had a door and in order to get to the door, that he were going to have to block the movement through the shopping center. It doesn't seem like a big problem but what you can't see in this picture is how close the entrance of the shopping center is and if somebody turns in fairly quickly and immediately turns to the right, they will encounter that truck in very short order. That's a very dangerous situation. The picture on the lower right hand corner is just a typical intersection, actually in one of the suburban areas to show that the goods movement issues are not use purely urban issues but there is a heavy volume of truck traffic moving everywhere. The types of truck may be different out in the suburb areas. We have more construction vehicles than we typically have in town. In either case we have a lot of trucks moving all around Atlanta. I did want to mention that a number of us yesterday -- I noticed in the attendance list that there's some folks, other folks from Atlanta listening in to this session, yesterday, there was a joint meeting. It was a landmark meeting that included the Atlanta regional commissions freight task force membership, the metropolitan Atlanta chamber of commerce transportation committee and their logistics committee and the conversation was some about the traffic congestion in Atlanta and the aspect of goods movement that contribute the to or is in impact the by that congestion with a very -- impacted by that congestion with a very strong focus about funding. I suspect this is something that hits everybody very, very strongly. We may know the solutions. Job said his goods movement coup committee is going to be looking at pulling together the strategies, the ideas for the solutions. And in a lot of cases, they are not big surprises. They are solutions that many of us have thought about, have studied have looked at for years, but we don't really know how to fund them. We don't know how to make them happen because funding is always very limited and people complain to their politicians when they sit in rush hour traffic but truck drivers don't often do the same kind of complaining to the politicians. They may complain to their dispatcher and the packages certainly don't complain about sitting in traffic. So funding overall is a problem but historically, things that deal heavily with the freight and goods movement side of the issue have struggled more to get funding because packages don't complain the way people do. And that's very much where we are in the Atlanta metro area. There's a lot of the dialogue. We have our legislature in session right now there's a lot of conversation about the funding future in the Atlanta metro area and in the state of Georgia because there's not enough money to do everything that needs to be done. With that I will close for the moment. There are some documents available via our web site. DOT has documents of interest on their web sites as well. I will be happy to answer any questions during the q and a period.
J. Seplow:
I hope everybody enjoyed all of these presentations. There's been a number of questions typed in. I'm going to start off the session by reading the typed in questions and then if we have time at the end we'll open up the phone lines for questions. Marsha, since you were the last one to present your presentation is fresh in everybody's minds, I think I will start with questions for you. One question was where can a copy of your study report be found? Is it available on the web site showing on the screen right now?
M. Anderson Bomar:
The only documents we have posted right now are the strategy guidebook and the slide presentation that I have given to the state transportation board. But if somebody goes to that link on our system and you can get to it via a link on our home page, there is a place where you can -- where you are asked to fill in your name and e-mail address at a comment section. You can fill in there that you are interested in a copy of the report and I can e-mail that out.
J. Seplow
The next question is how is it enforced for trucks to go around the city instead of through? There still has to be a large number of trucks going through the city.
M. Anderson Bomar:
Actually, the rate of violation is not as high as people would think. We did a lot of data collection during the course of the project, and on the roads outside the perimeter and outside the perimeter, the volume of truck traffic varies anywhere from 10% to 60% of the trucks of the traffic strain depending upon time of day and location. Inside of the perimeter, the truck traffic represents roughly 2% to 3% of the traffic. So clearly, a lot of it is self-enforced. The police are out there on a periodic basis, stopping trucks to check their credentials and their manifests, and of course, any time there's a incident, they check and again, I think there are violators but by and large, I think the violation rate is much smaller than most people would imagine.
J. Seplow:
Okay. The next question is does the Georgia DOT monitor the truck routes?
M. Anderson Bomar:
When you say the truck routes, I'm not sure what truck routes are being questioned. The Georgia Department of Transportation through various projects does look at the origins and destinations of truck traffic. We did some of that work during our study. I know that other work has been done using some of the freight analysis framework type data and the Reebee data. I know the Atlanta regional commission is also looking at the origin destination patterns for truck traffic and developing tools to understand that better. So if that's what the question is addressing, yes, everybody is looking at what those impacts are and what can be done to get the truck traffic where we would like it to be and what facilities need to be improve to make sure the trucks go where we want them to.
J. Seplow:
If you would like to type in a little more detail as to your question, please feel free to do so. And we'll revisit that. The next question is what percent of truck traffic occurs at night in the Atlanta area?
M. Anderson Bomar:
Well, that's an interesting question. The truck traffic -- if you look at the volume, actually stays relatively constant. What changes is the other traffic on the road network. During the daytime hours the truck traffic typically peaks at about 30 to 35% of the traffic stream, again, depending upon where you are in the metro area. During the overnight hours, though, it can go up as high as 60 or a little bit higher than 60% of the traffic stream.
J. Seplow:
Okay. Next question for you is how do you get the freight members of the task force interested in the MPO process of the long-range plan and the TIP?
M. Anderson Bomar:
That's a great question. I think part of it is to have them understand and fortunately, we have a group of very savvy people representing the industry side who have been attending these meetings who understand that even though they are bottom-line week to week, month to month responsible for their business operations, they also need the public sector to be making investments that help them do their job better. So they understand that even though some of the projects take longer to build than they wish, if they are not at the table helping to identify the projects that are critically important, those projects might never happen. And so they have engaged because they have seen in particular the arc staff and the folks who work with them really focusing in on identifying critical projects that will help the freight activity sector, you know, the shippers and the carriers, have a better system on which they can operate both in the near term through the smaller projects like intersection improvements and over the long-term with the bigger perhaps interchange improvement type projects. So it's helping them understand that they need to be there to help pull out those projects that will be most beneficial to their sector.
J. Seplow:
Okay. The next question is in Boston, we have a truck-only haul road in the part of the city. The state just developed a new convention center in this area and now there's pressure to use the haul road for moving convention users to nearby hotels. How does one balance this kind of competing uses?
M. Anderson Bomar:
I think the first thing that needs to happen is to look at the time of day of the different demands. It may be that if the haul route is primarily used in the daytime and the convention center and hotel activities are primarily nighttime, it may be that the use of that road is compatible for both. Safety has to be an overarching consideration, and if the two uses would overlap in such a way that, you know, the safety of either the haul vehicles or the general motorists could be -- would be compromised by the other ones being there, then they may not be able to mix the two together. There are not only capacity issues that have to be addressed but when you have vehicles that may be very -- that much different in both size and weight and operating characteristics, you can have to look at that as well when you start talking about balancing the competing uses.
J. Seplow:
Okay. The next question is there recent information available about truck only lanes on principle and also combined truck bus lanes on freeways?
M. Anderson Bomar:
I can't cite any truck references. But what I think may provide information, the Texas Transportation Institute probably has done more research in this area than anybody else. And I'm sure that through their web site there are probably some good references and I believe that -- I think they maintain a web site I'm not sure if it's for Texas or the Federal Highway Administration that provides information about that I think through their web site one could find resource material.
J. Seplow:
Okay. Last question I have for you is, Atlanta was developed as a regional distribution center for the south. Does it still play that role? What are the facilities for road, rail and ocean shipping.
M. Anderson Bomar:
It's very, very much an intermodal hub. The -- as I said the southern and the railroads, both have rail yards right in town. The Norfolk Southern railroad also has another very large, very modern intermodal facility that's about halfway or so going west toward Birmingham that is a big player in intermodal operations. The port is connected via I-16 and I-75 to the Atlanta metro area and there are many distribution centers, warehousing corridors around the metropolitan Atlanta area on all sides. It's not -- in some communities it's still fairly traditional where the stuff happens on the ought side of town. As things have grown in the metro area, we have those kinds of activities on the south side near the airport, on the west side of town near the rail yards and the industrial areas on the north side, there are other industrial and freight corridors. So it's -- yes, it's very much an intermodal area and it's spread out all offer the 20-county metropolitan area.
J. Seplow:
Okay. Thank you. Before we move on one participant mentioned he was having difficulty accessing your web site It's www.streetsmarts.us, right?
Yes
Okay. Thank you Marsha. We have questions for Jerry Robbins. I'm going to move on to you now. The first question is how strongly are the parking requirements enforced? It seems like you should be citing the scofflaws and not the double parked trucks.
J. Robbins:
I would say in the downtown area they are moderately strictly enforced. I agree that the scofflaws should be the target rather than the delivery vehicles. In fact, I think I pointed out that we -- if the delivery vehicles legally -- if they practically can't get to the curb, then they are allowed to double park. So we do try to clear out the people who are parked in the loading zones and not delivering goods in order to make room for the vehicles that are making deliveries.
J. Seplow:
The next question, due to peak period congestion do trucks arrive early morning and park on city streets and if so how is this managed?
J. Robbins:
Our parking regulations generally start at 7:00 a.m. in the morning. Prior to 7:00 a.m., anybody is free to use the streets for parking or for freight delivery. So there's not a whole lot of regulation or management prior to 7:00 a.m. I'm sure there's some freight delivery going on at those times and we certainly like to encourage people to do that. But we don't actively manage it prior to 7:00 a.m.
J. Seplow:
Boston is like San Francisco, in that there's housing mixed with commercial development. How does San Francisco create priorities to accommodate on street parking for residences and local businesses?
J. Robbins:
We do have a residential permit parking program like Boston does for the purely residential areas. However, on the commercial streets where there may be residential activity or land uses above the shops and restaurants, our priority for the on-street parking for those streets is for short-term parking for pickup and delivery and for the customers of the businesses. However, after 6:00 p.m., the -- those short-term parking regulations are not in effect so residents are free to park there if they can get a space.
J. Seplow:
Okay. The next question is have you considered a limited time and date type displayable permit for contractor parking?
J. Robbins:
We have looked at a variety of things. We looked at something called the personal parking meter which is used in some foreign countries where people can scratch out the date and the time that they are parking and post it on their windshield. We issue permits to contractors which is not on a daily basis but which they can purchase annually, and allows them to park in regular parking meter spaces without putting money into the meter. That's one program that we have for the contractors. But not a specific day and hour permit program.
J. Seplow:
Okay. The next question is how many businesses have you lost in the downtown area in the last few years due to no parking or having problems getting items to their businesses? And have you quantified the loss?
J. Robbins:
We do have parking. It's just fairly expensive and I think most businesses know that going in and there are good transit alternatives. As far as the getting freight deliveries I think most of the freight deliveries take place fairly smoothly. The most complaints we hear are from truckers who complain that there are vehicles parked in the zone that would be most convenient to them and forces them to double park but it doesn't prevent the delivery from being made.
J. Seplow:
Thank you. That's all of the questions that I see typed in right do you. Do any of the three presenters do you see any questions that may have been missed or sent to you privately?
No.
At this point, I think we can open the phone lines and see if anybody has questions over the phone.
Operator:
Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, key star followed by 1 on your touch tone phone. If your question has been answered key star followed by 2. Once again, that's star 1 to ask a question. It will be one moment while we compile a list of questions. I'm currently showing know questions.
J. Seplow:
Well, we do have a few minutes left. I will give each presenter a chance if they have anything -- any last comments. John, is there anything you want to say in closing?
J. Friebele:
Well, probably just add on to a couple of Jerry's questions about residential parking. We don't have near the downtown residential demands that I know San Francisco and Boston have. However, we do have some and we do issue residential parking permits that allow folks to use existing commercial or passenger loading zone spaces . After 6 p.m. at night, unless it's so stated on the signs that any commercial loading zone passenger loading zone and parking meter can condition used until 6:00 a.m. in the morning. So there's some ways to get around this. It's a very limited amount because of our limited demand. But it kind of works for us. Also as far as contractor parking, we actually sell space on a daily basis to folks involved in contracting activities. And we'll -- our rates are cheap. We'll sell a 22-foot area of curb, an equivalent parking space, for $10 a day, and we have one person whose job amongst two others permit-wise to is issue permits for these purrs. That's all I have. Thank you.
J. Seplow:
Thank you. We do have a question from the room that I'm in. If you want to come up here.
Attendee:
I'm with the Federal Highway Administration's International Programs Office. The question is directed to Marsha and perhaps all three. Several years ago, I received a question from the logistics manager of Coca-Cola, which is perhaps the biggest Atlanta-based multi national corporation, and that gentleman whose name unfortunately I forgot asked whether we had some guidelines for the regulation of parking for delivery vehicles in developing countries. As you know, coca-cola is distributing its beverages in at least 150 countries in the world. We didn't have any regulations at that time and I wonder what the regular laying I think John is trying to put together, a nationwide distribution may be useful to the ref of the world. Incidentally, the series of freight professional development programs are also being received by the World Bank, particularly the global transportation and trade facility partnership and I think the lessons learned from the u.s. may or may not be very applicable in developing countries or in Europe but there are a lot of lessons to be learned for both from Europe and developing countries. I wonder what your comments are on -- particularly to Marsha, whether there have been comments or questions from information from Coca-Cola or other multi-national corporations.
M. Anderson Bomar:
I've not received any questions inquiries from them but I will do some follow-up to see if they have gotten that information from any other source. But I would like to mention and I suspect that John Friebele is probably already aware of this but the other listeners may not be. Many years ago, probably five or six years ago, the Institute of Transportation Engineers had a committee final report delivered, I guess I worked long enough on it. Committee number was 6448 back in the days when they had technical council committees, and it was eventually a survey of what is happening in the arena of loading dock requirements looking at it from the perspective of not only the public sector but the private development arena as well as other professionals. One of the interesting things that came out of that is that there are very few places that have off-street loading requirements that are based on any actual data collection and/or analysis. A lot of it is seat of the pants, just -- they heard something from somebody, nothing formal. One of the other interesting things is an awful lot of the development of such facilities are driven by architects who have whatever rules of thumb they have, again, not developed necessarily by any analytical means, very often they rely on zoning codes or development regulation which they have assumed are based on some kind of rational measure, which they frequently are not, and so it's been a very cyclical thing that everybody things everybody else knows the answer but nobody really knows the answer about what is required. What that results in is a frequently either a dramatic over requirement for loading dock facilities that take up valuable land and don't get used on a regular basis or in some cases, you know, a battle ensues and permission is given for a reduction in that loading space that is required by ordinance and in a lot of cases, it's been underbuilt which causes trucks to be backed up or stacked up or double parked on the adjacent roads or creating congestion because they can't stop so they circulate around and around the nearby blocks. And so what jumps out in my mind based on your question, I think there's a dramatic need, particularly as congestion all around the country grows to really understand what it is we know because before we can turn around and share our knowledge with other countries, it seems from my position that we ought to understand what it is we have and we've been doing a little bit more clearly so we can communicate with some authority because right now I think there's very few places that have that kind of knowledge where they can communicate with authority.
Attendee:
I agree. From a corporate perspective, the issues we have to address are questions of productivity and efficiency and cost-effectiveness. In other words, the bottom line issues. The issues of enforcement and what it does to the drivers, but the bottom line for the corporation. I think we have very little information. But those are the sort of issues that the World Bank and Asian development bank and others are addressing in their studies in the urban goods movement. I think we may be able to learn from as well.
J. Seplow:
John or Jerry, did you want to add anything to Marsha's comments?
J. Friebele:
Not really. But when we did the practice, the other day, we did make the observation that we didn't bring up today that there seems to be a very large disconnect between the folks that are actually operating and regulating on street parking and the folks that are planning it, primarily the difference between the engineer function and the planning department function in many cities. And the users who are often left out of the equation.
I would agree with that.
Yeah. That's true but in our case, the stakeholders, the users, have intersected themselves pretty firmly.
J. Seplow:
Okay. Actually two more questions have popped up in the meantime. I'm going to try to get through those in the next few minutes, we have about five minutes left . For Marsha, what techniques did you use to make the freight operators participate?
M. Anderson Bomar:
Food is always a good one. I say it flippantly but the reality is we did hold a number of lunch meetings and since it certainly seems as if you're taking less of a chunk out of your day and your lunch is taken care of, it's at least good as a way to engage people up front. Obviously if we didn't have meaningful dialogues, then they probably wouldn't have come back for the second lunch. I think part of it is doing something to entice them to the table the first time and then making sure that you have meaningful information to share that you are not having meetings just for the sake of meetings, that you give them the opportunity to certainly voice their perspective on things. We did a lot of information gathering that was focused on their issues which are very short-term issues. You know they have to make a profit this month to stay in business. So us talking about a road project that may take 20 years to develop really doesn't grab their attention. But understanding their very specific you as and seeing what can be incorporated that will be somewhat responsive to their short-term needs, then they are willing to spend the extra time and talk about the long-term picture. So those are some of the things we've done. I know the Atlanta regional commission for the freight task force meeting has also brought in outside speakers who have something really valuable to say and in some cases they've invited some of the task force members who have good things to share to be the speakers for various meetings. So it's a combination of things that keep the information flowing in the -- and the interest alive.
J. Seplow:
Okay. Thank you. Last question is for Jerry. Do the revenues from the metered parking help fund auto independent projects such as transit?
J. Robbins:
The answer is yes. I think the first $7 million collected from our parking meters go to the municipal railway which is our city transit operator. And that money is available. The revenues from the parking citations go into the city's general fund and are not targeted for transportation improvements but get used for a variety of purposes.
J. Seplow:
Thank you. In closing, Jerry, did you want to add any last comments?
J. Robbins:
Well, just the issue of enforcement. We had a couple of questions about that. It's a real challenge. It's a very difficult job and there -- when you are dealing with downtown situations, you are often dealing with confrontations with people who are behind the wheel. I think that's a big challenge for every city.
J. Seplow:
Okay. Thank you. And Marsha, any last comments from you?
M. Anderson Bomar:
No, that's fine, Jennifer.
J. Seplow:
Well, thank you to all three presenters. We appreciate your presentations today. And thank you all for attending today's seminar. The recorded version of this event will be available within the next week on the Talking Freight web site The next seminar will be held on March 16, and is titled "Truck Separated Lanes/Truck Tolling." If you haven't done so already, I encourage you to visit the Talking Freight Web Site and sign up for this seminar as well as future seminars. I also encourage you to join the Freight Planning LISTSERV if you have not already done so.
Enjoy the rest of your day!
