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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 Analyzing Regional and Interregional Freight Movements and Infrastructure Investment Decisions.
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:
Adie Tomer is an associate fellow at the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and a member of the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative. His work focuses on metropolitan infrastructure usage patterns, including personal and freight transportation, and the intersections between infrastructure and technological development.
Joseph Kane is a researcher at the Metropolitan Policy Program. His work contributes to the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative, with a focus on transportation and freight movement. Prior to Brookings, he was an economist at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Bruce Lambert is the Executive Director of the Institute for Trade and Transportation Studies. ITTS is a multistate research institution formed to assist member states on understanding the relationship of transportation needs to international and commercial traffic. Mr. Lambert has worked for various firms researching trade and transportation activities, including the US Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Highway Administration, Standard and Poor's DRI (now IHS Global Insight), and the Port of Long Beach.
Chris Maciejewski is a Principal with DKS Associates in Portland, OR. Chris specializes in long-range transportation planning and operational analysis projects including city-wide plans, corridor plans, and circulation studies throughout the northwest. He has worked with ODOT staff to develop methods for forecasting the duration of congestion and travel time reliability on Portland area corridors, which were applied in assessing regional economic corridor performance.
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.
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Finally, I encourage everyone to please also download the evaluation form from the file share box and submit this form to me after you have filled it out.
I'm now going to turn it over to Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane of the Brookings Institute to get started.
Adie Tomer
Thanks for the introduction, Jennifer. Also thanks to Chip and the rest of the FHWA team for giving us an opportunity to talk about our research and to hear from the other presenters about what is going on in their neck of the woods. Again, my name is Adie Tomer. I will be kicking off our presentation and Joseph Kane will take over for the middle portion, and I will come back at the end to talk about the implications of our work. The presentation today is broken up into three parts. First, is to talk about the background of a project. We've been working on it for about 2.5 years to better understand intraregional trade flows and will get into the dynamics of that. Then Joe will talk about the findings of our project over the last year or so and give a preview of the findings we'll be having in the future. And then finally part three will talk about some of the implications for that work with a particular focus on the potential for federal policy and hopefully see if the other conversations with regional work going on elsewhere in the country.
As a background for the project, we realize that freight oftentimes is commandeered by an extensive moral focus on hardware goods are moving on particular transportation modes. While that in and of itself is critical to the conversations, we realize that infrastructure economists but especially people who are just interested in regional economies and the places that are doing the producing, consuming, and often times just the logistics of warehousing and the through put work, we are kind of being lost in the shuffle. We want to take a step back and better understand why places trade goods, who trades goods with one another, and finally which modes are helping make sure they can match up production and consumption across the country and the world. Now, we have broken up our work into different parts. Back in October of 2013 we released a series of two papers. One, looking at trade flows within particular metropolitan areas. This includes the regional trade balance, which alone we recommend you take a look at because they are not really published by anyone and it kind of looks that individual metrics and it's almost like they are their own country. There's also a primer on how regional economies relate to trade flows and that could be good for resources, but I would not recommend reading it too much, as it would probably put you to sleep. The third one is also a video component that can be interesting and used by all folks and it's available online and you can see the YouTube link there. Then this past year in November we also released a report looking at the trade flows between markets. That was a really interesting interactive data element of which Joe will give you an example of later in the presentation. We also recommend you take a look at those but also to look at how trade flows go in and out of the market you live in now. Maybe the hometown where you grew up also can be a very strong demonstration about how to communicate the importance of freight to folks who may not be as interested naturally or even working in industry. And finally Joe will give you a preview of some of the data that we will be releasing in the coming months and which particular modes move the most goods and help ports and that includes seaports, land border crossings, who's doing the most work and where that with a flowing. With that I will turn it over to Joe to get started on the project findings.
Joseph Kane
Great, thanks. This material can get quite dense but we will break it up into three chunks here kind of looking at what is metro freight, what is being moved and how much. Where's it going and getting to the network piece, and then finally a preview of what we are releasing in the coming months of how are all these goods moving. By looking at our move trade database that includes over four hundred regions, domestically and internationally, we can see just for the first time how much trade or goods movement occurs within the US by itself, which is over $17.2 trillion every year. And when you think of most traditional measures, where we are only looking at international exports and imports in Mexico and Canada and elsewhere, that's only 15% of the pie. Really, we are doing a fundamental recalibration of how we are looking at freight nationally and that in many places these networks are very important in their domestic sphere. If we break it down further, we can also see the specific commodities that tend to dominate these movements and you can see once again that domestic movement very much eclipses international movement, except as you can see as our advanced industrial products we can see tools and machinery and transportation equipment and electronics, a lot of innovation for different firms in different markets. This gives a quick example of what we can see in individual metros throughout the country, many of which are intuitive, but for the first time we can gauge it through our data. In Detroit you would imagine there would be a lot of transportation equipment, but in fact there is over $100 billion of transportation equipment moving domestically and internationally every year. Minneapolis has over $24 billion in instruments moving every year. Then we can look at San Jose and Silicon Valley with over $102 billion in electronics which are sourced there annually. And then finally we think of Houston and other metros where we can see over $125 billion in chemicals and plastics moving overall. There is tremendous regional variety that we see in the text of goods that are moving, and they are often linked to particular economic specialties in these regions. If we just look and kind of take a step back at the overall volumes that are moving among these different markets, we can see that the 100 largest metropolitan areas nationally play a distinct role in guiding these flows, and we can see relative to other measures they only make up about 12% of land area, 66% of population, and over 75% of our total GDP, but when you look at this trade it is actually 80%. So they are very much playing an active role in this entire domestic and international network. We also consider what is driving these exchanges between different regions that in other words, they have distinctive economic specialties, they are moving types of goods, but what factors are specifically influencing these flows? For the most part we see that population, not surprisingly, plays a lead role in this like in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Even the complementary industry, like Pittsburgh with metals or Cincinnati and then even the size of logistics workforce is we think of places like Louisville or even Memphis that ultimately these factors in addition to simple proximity distance between different markets complete a key role guiding these movements. If we look at the way that the network works nationally, it can get quite complex and there are many different routes that stretch between the different regions. This map here simply shows the top 1% of all of our routes, so 800 routes nationally and you can see that the largest metropolitan areas, LA, Chicago, New York, Houston and even Miami are the clear hubs of the national network but they are also trading vacantly with smaller regional partners so we kind of see the hub and spoke network design to the way that we are moving goods between different metropolitan areas. The circle map shown gives you kind of a preview of the interactive for our mapping freight report this past fall, and this is giving an example of chemicals and plastics moving between different regions. Particularly again along the Gulf Coast where you can see there is a lot of intense activity between parts of Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere that often influence the type of mode and particular connections used. This kind of is the tail end of our most recent release, where we kind of emphasize the fact that not only is there this huge network moving over $17.2 trillion domestically and $3 trillion internationally in the major metropolitan hub, but over 77% of all these goods are actually moving across state borders. So in other words, this network is not only highly concentrated but it is also highly interconnected meaning one problem in a particular region can often ripple through the entire system. If we turn our attention to the particular ways in which we move our goods, we can see that trucks are the big players here where they're moving over 67% of all the value and nearly 60% while the weight between different metropolitan areas naturally. This is important and we think of major ports of congestion and throughput again since many of these connections are interconnected, thus a problem in one market can easily influence problems in other markets.
At the same time though, we can also consider just the pure international movement that over 75% of our international exports and imports are passing through just 17 metropolitan areas nationally. So as was mentioned earlier, it not only includes airports in New York but also major land of water crossings in Detroit, El Paso, and elsewhere. On the flipside though, only 5% of all of these goods are actually destined for these local markets. In other words, many of the goods we see passing through the ports of LA, Long Beach, especially right now during the West coast slow down, are rippling throughout the entire country and these economies are highly interconnected and one problem in one region can affect and cause ripples in other regions.
Adie Tomer
Based on the findings we came up with implications and next steps for our work. Where it really starts with us, and I want to take a minute to talk to this map which some have seen something similar about it. This emphasizes what Joe was talking about how the flow of goods between different markets across the country to call the concentrate along certain quarters at the same time the two anchors to those trade flows are the largest metropolitan markets. What goes on in those markets is not just goods movement; there is a tremendous amount of local commercial industry. Of the deeper bread to flows basically stretching from red to yellow and high amounts of long distance truck values, and this is based on 2007 data, which is the most recent. You can see that the flows primarily look like a limited list of primary interstate and US roads moving between markets. Now where those corridors come together, you can see the gray circles. Places like Los Angeles and New York have the largest circles, and relatively smaller circles for smaller trading depots like Kansas City or Milwaukee or Minneapolis. Of the other element to see inside those circles are the blue dots off on the national highway system. Those of the levels of congestion across the country, and when you quickly tend of get to see it put together is that those intrastate trade flows, 77% on of all goods, were 80% of all goods that end or start in metros, once they had those places they are immediately confronted with congestion costs by local commerce. Essentially what we are realizing is that the call for national freight strategy and national freight investment is really all about the angle of local commerce and we need greater efficiencies in our system to promote more economic growth across country. That is in general what we are calling for. We need to take a step back from a more motor focused conversation, like I mentioned in the beginning, and look more at who's doing the training.
Manufacturing, production hunts and service industries inside these regional economies and understand the importance of international commerce especially as the majority of potential trade growth will occur outside of the US borders over the next multiple decades. Finally, which particular freight corridors and places of national significance will do the bulk of the movement for every market in the country? We are not just a landscape of it will trade and of course equal economy. Certain places and certain corridors simply matter more than others. What we are proposing is that all three levels of government needs to work together on how the project policy amendments, alternatives moving forward. On the federal level which will get into more detail in the next slide is we need to recognize that maintaining particular assets and public assets like the interstate network are critical for the future of the country. But then at the state level we need to also understand how to forge better partnerships with neighboring states that trade more, and how to leverage congested areas with smart local planning areas, especially around land uses, to grow trade.
Last of all, a federal investment program for trade. We have broken down this proposal into a few different sections. We want to emphasize we are a true nonprofit organization so there is no lobbying going on here. These are just general concepts that we would like to see and a new federal trade investment program because we simply don't have one now. We want to make sure we distribute certain amount of guaranteed funding across the country. This shouldn't dominate but it's important that every state has some investment to make in those critical sites of productions and consumption and we would recommend they be based on performance criteria rather than stock asset levels. Secondly, and this is the real key to our program, is place-based competition and recognize that certain places respond to the hype of trading for the country. Oftentimes in these places there is not a single metrics of projects they might need. This is over 70 projects that make up Chicago's program. Many of which are real related but not necessarily all that we need to figure out how to reward those kinds of partnerships between specific places that finally we need to also upgrade the data and eligibility that we consider for freight investment. Investing in better data is a crucial component of making a better decision in the country that simply put we don't have enough metrics it to best understand where to make not just federal investment but also the smartest and best use of state and local investment work we are recommending higher investment, the freight analysis framework and similar analysis from other agencies and finally to make really smart eligibility criteria for how we evaluate decisions. If we can combine those two together we can make sure both formula and competitive based programs are going to the highest and best uses. So we want to thank everyone for taking the time to listen to these presentations. We apologize that we normally do these in widescreen and it does not perfectly fit. If there's been any confusion we apologize and we are happy to go back and indicate some of the information on each one of them. Thank you.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you Adie and Joseph. We are now going to move on to Bruce Lambert from Institute for Trade and Transportation Studies. Again, if you want to mention that all presentations are available for download in the box in the lower right-hand corner of your screen come up along with the evaluation form.
Bruce Lambert
Hello, everyone this is Bruce Lambert. One of the things I was thinking about during the first presentation is that there was a lot of ground covered in those slides, and there were a lot of things that people are talking about regarding freight and goods movement. One of the things I find interesting is that we have to look at goods movement probably in a different frame that we've been looking at in the past, because we have concentrated services that was mentioned earlier, we have a lot of land use decisions, we have a lot of interaction between local and regional hubs. All of these things are complicating freight planning and they also complicate the relationship between various parties, because if you look at congestion in an urban area, a lot of that congestion may be local roads that are not necessarily in state network, but it still has a bearing upon goods movement and especially in the little connectors. So it's kind of interesting that were having this discussion right now about evaluating corridors and how do we study them. I think everyone is trying to figure out, given limited money, how do we prioritize investments going forward and how do we demonstrate the value of making an investment
If we are planning for freight today, traditionally we looked at how does freight move in my state. We would tend to ignore the overhead traffic, as we assumed it was always there. That it's just a part of the nature of the traffic that we handle, and it is dedicated along major through corridors. When we start looking at freight movement within our state, it's going to be trucks and a lot of rural urban flows such as construction equipment, mining, lumber, agriculture etc. There's going to be a lot of urban/urban flows, kind of distribution and smaller flows. When you start looking at to and from the state, that tends to be more mobile and you'll see more rail and water along with more pipelines. For most states their largest trading partner is the state that neighbors them, for instance Louisiana's largest trading partner is with Texas, and Tennessee's partners with the states that border them and etc. So we are so interconnected, it's something we tend to recognize that we don't begin to consider how they get in and out of our network. Finally, what a lot of people look at is through freight, and this is an interesting thing because you talk about through freight it's all cargo, but when you talk about moving freight off of highways to another mode, we tend to gravitate towards the through freight movement. Can we alleviate congestion in City A by putting barges that could move through city A and not necessarily have a bearing on local traffic? So we're talking about freight, everything falls into this jurisdiction of improving local circulation and local freight movement to and from the state, or even how we handle the overhead traffic and if we can divert that to other modes, or can we can divert to other corridors.
For instance, the Florida DOT did a really good series of things about their economy. They have a state strategic network they've identified; this is the summary of that. It's interesting because if you look at it, Florida has a very dense network of airports and Ocean ports and has of course the highway system. The insert has the arrow showing how they trade to global markets, and then the small arrows show how they trade to the United States. What's interesting is Florida DOT is responsible for this larger structural system. They're going to be able to do a really good job of promoting the value of that system. This is Mississippi and they did a study several years ago and we see the same thing. If you notice all of their freight corridors, highway, rail, and other corridors, all do not have an origin or destination within the state of Mississippi. They transit through Mississippi. The most important corridors are how they connect to other markets. They are not there because they want to visit Kentucky or any of those states, but they are there because they're traveling through the state. If you look at it again, it is basically hard to evaluate a one-size-fits-all approach when most of the freight is out of the control of the jurisdiction that is responsible for the infrastructure.
Of course we look at the SASHTO states in the Southeast that 35% of their trade is regional and that's larger than the share of interest they trade as a group. Only 14% of that trade goes to other US markets. If I was considering how the Southeast states fit into the world, the majority of the freight movement is really going to be tied to its regional flows and correspondingly to other international markets. These are the types of things that I think were echoed earlier, but I think we have to fully recognize that when we are thinking about freight, it doesn't necessarily mean we can control the incentives or control why freight moves there therefore a lot of criteria that is external to what the state DOT is actually responsible for in determining freight demands.
One of the things I struggle with is defining a multistate corridor. I always say it has to be multijurisdictional. If the freight corridor only existed within an MPO or state, and there is no jurisdictional involvement, even though it is a freight corridor, the state or the agency responsible for that corridor could literally do the work without having to do additional planning. It could be part of their ongoing operations, or maintenance of project delivery programs. One of the things I think we are starting to talk more about is multimodal options. Is there another mode, whether it be rail or water, that could alleviate some the highway congestion if I was able to find a way to incentivize goods movement for the secondary corridor. Another thing we have to mention is that traffic generators have to have enough volume and businesses to generate freight activity. If we talk about a freight corridor that is not very large, it is not right to call it a freight corridor when there are probably other corridors that have truck volumes with greater activity. One of the things I think of when we are discussing this is the economic integration. More people are trying to ask 'what is the economics of the supply chain?' and 'what is the economics of the valuation of how these are tied together?' From an economic development perspective, a lot of people are discussing the question "how can I create value-added businesses using my existing transportation and using my existing economic geography so I can attract and grow jobs tied to the industry and try to find a way to attract additional value-added services to make that much more competitive for our region? You're starting to hear a lot more the bottom part and you are also starting to hear people talk about not so much a cluster of the city, but rather several cities selling themselves as a regional cluster or a regional development magnet. This is an interesting slide. I like a lot of the stuff they do, but if you look at the share trucks that go through Louisville, as it sits there between Kentucky and Ohio, within 20 for hours, there are trucks all over the United States that passed through Louisville within a week, as the numbers indicate. So we're talking about goods movement and it's almost hard to ignore the fact that the trucks are moving regionally, but also they can move throughout the United States and there's an implication for truck parking and hours of service and things of that nature.
When we start talking about a particular node like Louisville, it really fits into a larger service area regarding trucking. It's one of those things I think we tend to ignore, these relationships in these corridors. Again looking at the longer truck driving in traffic, the more miles they spend in traffic, the more congestion they have. I think that's the same for every driver. You do see where there is less driving congestion and a lot of these states have dense urban areas. A lot of dense freight activity New York, Chicago, Texas, California. So you see these large areas are adding to congestion, but more and more you're seeing people discussing congestion for its own and things of that nature in these other cities and other metro areas.
When you're talking about regional thinking, people have been doing this for several years. This is not new. There was a good study looking at the bottlenecks and future bottlenecks, but one thing is when they did the study, there was really no way for the states to coordinate the investment over that study. I'm going to talk about the creation of ITTS it just a bit. We did a lot of work on I-70 but again, there was a lot of focus on a regional corridor. There's always a broader cost in coalitions and it started with ITTS. They've done a lot of stuff on regional coordination. People have being thinking regionally for a long time. Once you do a regional multistate study, how do you actually make sure that the agreed priorities across that study are addressed? That's where it gets difficult since you have a lot of different stakeholders who are involved in prioritizing the project.
For instance, this is the LATTS network. The states agreed on what was the strategic network and they identified the strategic airports of the Southeast based on landings and tonnage. Their agreed upon ports using the criteria of regional significance, and the same thing for railroads. So the states came together and identified this network. Again, that's one of the things I think is so interesting about these multistate regions, is we don't necessarily think about how we define the appropriate level of geography, because obviously not every road is on this network. Not every port is on this network, and not every airport is on this network. We have to strategically think what really is the most important piece is of infrastructure for us to consider going forward.
This is a slide that came out of Wired magazine. They took the I-85 corridor and they said this is all the different businesses along I-85, there is a lot of manufacturing and automotive stuff. I was thinking to myself, I have never seen a similar map like this done on the highway side. Basically showing the interaction of the major businesses and traffic generators and major industry clusters and you notice how all of these people have different supply chains. So when you consider how a planner is going to have to put in and capture the intricacies of all of these evolving relationships for just one corridor when I have many corridors within my state.
Of course, echoing what we said earlier, national freight priority, we going to talk about improving maritime activity, trucking activity, and local urban activity. All of these are important considerations in the supply chain and all of them have different areas that should be addressed and can be addressed, but how do you prioritize the national needs unless you can identify what really are the top nodes to connect to the network.
Of course this is the national freight network and there's a lot of discussion on this. The Federal Highway Administration did a lot of work on it. It's interesting they came up with this arbitrary number and realistically, if you read the reviews and comments it was actually probably too limiting for what really the network needed to be - which means that when we really think through what the national freight network should be: maybe the criteria should be not so much looking at a numeric number for the centerline miles but looking at what really are criteria that states can use to designate what really are their primary corridors in the national context. It's interesting because some of the people were complaining or the comments were that they had a very small facility that they were trying to develop, in intermodal facility or something and they wanted to be considered a national freight network, but maybe this site was too small or the project wasn't completed yet. They may have some type of infrastructure gap that they need.
This is something from the Tenn-Tom waterway. They took a river system to the corridor and they measured the impact for this river system. Again here is another mode but it is an analytical framework that I've not seen done on highways. So again another one of those things that some of the other remote have tools or they've done studies that we should now be considering when we look at our own on highway side as well.
Analytical tools- Do we have the data? There are federal data sets, we have mentioned the CFS and there's always back your data and the vehicle information that's out there. There are several people with private data sets both internationally and for domestic flows. One thing I discovered is there is also local transportation data. We do traffic counts and with things of that nature intended not to think of those as being a source to calibrate models but they're there. And then of course we have a lot of economic models, sharp two, and NCFRP, a lot of people have being proposing different economic models to look at freight, and again I recommend those two programs specifically to look specifically at how people done it. The core has its own planning horizon where they capture economic models to their own planning events. So we have all the tools and we kind of need to do this kind of stuff. But what we don't know is how to prioritize the networks in such a way that we can apply these tools to make them scalable.
This is one of the things I keep thinking about is if we really think about improving broad freight corridors, there is always this issue of local politics. For instance maybe an alternative route should be proposed or should be developed to alleviate congestion and one urban area, but for political reasons the alternative media not be viable or they may not consider taking that investment and putting it into another facility 200 miles away to provide a broad regional overflow. Of course we talk about the concentration of freight movement, the West coast ports and the labor issue has really shown people having too concentrated in our freight movements makes it hard for us to be nimble when we have responses. We tend to forget that freight tends to move incrementally. If I have a facility I tend to put more and more and more in that facility and it's not necessarily if I get to this level I then go and build another facility, but we tend to incrementally try to put as much traffic as we can through the facility that is already there which leads to my next point. There are a lot of issues over freight identification where we have a lot of freight facilities and investment, and a lot of warehousing and capital investment ports and they are just not going to move. So even if you have a cluster that is developed around an airport, you're still going to have traffic problem simply because other businesses sprung up around that airport. No matter how much you try to make that improvement you might be restricted by right-of-way and other things like that to make that investment to improve all over efficiencies. Some of the things we're talking about now is truck parking and the hours of service, and what does that really do for trucks? Even though maybe it's a good move and strategy is still political constructs limit how much effectively can really be moving these forward.
One of the things I think multistate studies are really good it's a way for states to share information on what people are doing and an understanding supply chains and relations between those particular groups and also it gives people an idea how important it is in places like West Virginia, even though it's a small segment of road in West Virginia it still has a tremendous amount of freight on it. It gives people an idea of where do I fit into the world and how does the world need my system. I think it definitely has an idea of looking at data and economics. We talk about freight advisory councils and how we will work with those types of groups and committees and of course the bottom thing is that it's a benchmark. We really don't do a lot of stuff on how do we compare against or how does this interstate compare to these other interstates. We need to start having these discussions about what the stock of the infrastructure we have, and how much does the economy depend upon it. There were some comments related to this, and I think this was echoed earlier, you have to identify the network and the system that you are going to do your study on to determine what is the project selection that you are going to use. There are a lot of tools and analytical frameworks available and you just need to figure out how you have to apply them. The bottom thing is, the most important thing is managing expectations and managing the fact that not everybody is going to get a Christmas tree and a shiny new car. Some people might get something less than what they expected, but the overall benefit to the region might be more than maybe they could do without that partnership. Thank you very much, Jennifer.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you, Bruce. I know we have a few questions in there. We will get to those at the end. I encourage everyone to continue typing questions but now we are going to move on to our final presentation which will be given by Chris Maciejewski of DKS Associates.
Chris Maciejewski
Thank you, Jennifer. I am excited to follow up on the presentations because I think the national and regional context is important to how we look at a court or specific strategy within the Portland region and some of the factors we consider. Hopefully everyone else finds that useful as well. What I am going to share today and you see on my site here is a presentation I gave last month at the tier be conference in DC. This is an overview of the study we did in a Portland region looking at our Westside industry for computer and electronics manufacturers and how their access and logistic needs are affected by congestion in the region of what we can do to help at those. For a brief overview, I will start with a little bit of context about the Portland region export initiative and how that relates to job creation for the region. A little bit about the role of the computer and electronics sector within that export context and then the bulk of the presentation I want to talk about the analysis that we did and get into some details with some of the data sets we utilize in the types of strategies we ended up developing and where we ended up with our recommendations.
To begin with, the Portland Metropolitan area was one of for MPO's that received a grant to develop an expert initiative plan. What Portland area is really looking at other jobs that are created by exports. Nearly one part of the Portland economy is based on exports. There is being a goal established by the region for job creation that asks the question of how we can double the value of our exports over the next five years. That five-year peace is critical to go how we did our study because we were really tasked with coming up with a strategy on the transportation network to support that group and so when you think about a five-year window we are talking about projects or solutions that we can identify plan, design and construct and had that in the system in the next five years so that really shapes the concept of the dollar value and the environmental impact potential strategies that come out of the initiative. So keep that in mind as we go through the slides.
The regional export initiative, as I mentioned, started with this nationally funded grant that the region obtained. They develop this export strategy to look at how do we double our goods? And one of the first things that were identified with that was where the key value in the exports coming out of the region is? They tallied up the computer and electronics industry and found that almost 2/3 of the value of the region export are coming from that sector. So their strategy looked at how we identify where those are really being manufactured, let's talk to the manufacturers. Let's talk to the corridors and carriers that are moving the goods and really understand the industry perspective of what the needs are and feed that into a transportation study that I was a part of and looking at how do we develop network improvement to make it all work.
To first look at the context of where this happens with the Portland Metropolitan region here and we are looking at a box that is a subset of the region where out on the west side we have this cluster of computer and electronics manufacturers. We refer to it as our silicon Forest. Intel is the biggest name of that cluster there and what's interesting about the geography is those goods are manufactured out on the west side and then they have to make it over to our freight consolidation area of by our airports and the geography between those two dictates that you have to cross through the most congested part of the region, the downtown Portland court order to get the goods from one side to the other. So that is kind of the core of our problem is how do we move goods across that congested network?
A key part of our conversations with the industry, again the manufacturers and orders and carriers understands what the real flows that are happening are. What are the modes that are being realized. One of the first things that were really important to understand for our study is shown a little bit on the bottom left graphic there. This study ended up being all about truck freight movement and that is how most of the goods leave that west side cluster now. One of the things that was clarified for us was that when those trucks move from the west side to the PDX freight consolidation area, myself and several others assume that a large portion of that then left Portland on a plane because the freight consolidation is next to the airport. But we actually discovered and this corresponds well with one of the graphics from the first presentation today is that Portland is not one of the major international export hubs. What ends up happening here is freight consolidation, these goods get sorted and put on the proper trucks and then they go out to SSO to LAX or Seattle/Tacoma and that's where they get on planes and leave the country that was an important dynamic first understand as we start looking at solutions. There were some people asking questions about why don't we just extend the airport on the west side of the Portland region have freight goods leave to a secondary airport but this really helped us focus in on the truck movement and how we are helping to get goods out the other major ports. The second thing that we got out of the industry interviews was the roots that the carriers rely upon. On the bottom right graphic there in light blue I've highlighted a freeway corridor. That is US-26 I-405 and I-5 as the primary connection to get to the Westside to the freight consolidation area. The issue is that that freeway corridor works very well and off peak hours and in the middle of the night it's only about a 35 minute trip but during the afternoon peak when these goods are leaving the manufacturers and they are trying to get it out to that market, that corridor is very congested and very unreliable work and so they start to rely on a secondary route which I've shown in red on the graphics and that route uses a rural arterial corridor to go north over a significant hill that have some both grade and horizontal curve issues to connect to US-30 which is an arterial highway court or and provide the back door into the freight consolidation area. We know we rely upon trucks to move these goods and we now know the two roots that are relied upon for those movements. With those routes identified, we started to ask the orders in carriers and manufacturers, what are the indicators of the performance measures that are the most important for them to make their decision about how to ship? And what came out of that was a set of performance metrics that really focused on the travel times and the most important things with the average travel time from the origin of destination and also the reliability of that travel time.
One of the interesting things we learned from the interviews was historically, if you are out on the Westside and this goes back 10 years or so, if you wanted to get let's say microchips off the manufacturing floor and out to the PDX freight consolidation area to leave on a plane by 6:00 p.m., you're cut time for manufacturing was something like 3:00 p.m. and it had to go and get out there. With reliability issues and increasing congestion we've had over the last 10 years, that cutoff time have moved from 3:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon. So from the manufacturers site there is a significant concern over the reliability of the system and the impact that that has had on their production time.
With the concerns about the limited connect to ready and focus on travel, I want to talk a little bit about what are the data tools and the analysis we did to assess those performance metrics are the corridors. I'm going to provide a brief overview of how we utilize the data for freight volume. How we look at archives, GPS travel time data looking at tom-tom data sets and also some freeway incident evaluation that you looked at again looking at travel time reliability. So the first data set that we've looked into was the at tree data. We were trying to use this to confirm what we were hearing from the carriers that what are the routes people are using and is there really this pattern of avoiding the freeway tearing congested periods and use it all I think this rural arterial secondary routes and they're trying to ship the goods in the afternoon. First, at the data set built off of freight vehicle GPS information but an important point for us is that that freight data is based on large trucks. Semi tractor-trailer vehicles in one of the things we know about our particular industry is the computer and electronics goods, while very high value, are actually very low volume. They may be able to fit a whole shipment into the trunk of a car. So FedEx and UPS and some of the smaller carriers actually carry both of those goods and we can't rely entirely on this data set to rely on it but we can use some tendril trends and another point about the data was we weren't able to get our hands on the raw data sets. This shows a query of the data that we had run for us where we said show us all of the flow pattern in and out of the Westside of the Portland region so we can see what corridors were carrying the most freight volume. And then they also provided us breakdown by time of day, which corridors for caring that volume and we compared it to a regional average to see is there a trend throughout the day in these corridors that we are concerned about where in the off-peak hours highway 26 and I-5 B in this key route and carry it higher than average and then we look at the afternoon peak period in the two red bars you see on the screen there show where the congestion hits. Afternoon peak on Highway 26 suddenly our corridor goes from being above regional average in freight volume two below regional and so this confirms to us the shift to avoid congestive freeway and look for the routes in the afternoon period. The second data set we looked at was archived GPX information. The Oregon Department of transportation is by the data set to utilize this analysis and one of the key things we did with this was look at our worst bottlenecks on the two different routes. Our freeway corridor and arterial court or and get our mind around what is the difference in the travel variation between the two. In the bottom right we have a plot that shows the upper index between the corridors. And Green we are showing the arterial court or in the worst bottleneck on that route and an orange we are showing the freeway corridor and what we found that what we found comparing the worst bottlenecks there are six times variation on the freeway corridor compared to the other side and that's white carriers are looking for more reliable system.
Tom-Tom data is similar to that INREX it is also archived GPS data and the Department of transportation has also access to a set of profiles from tom-tom and we looked into the tom-tom data because one of the key issues with the local agency was telling us about for the travel time issues was rant meter impacts. In the afternoon shift changes and people are commuting home that's when the trucks are trying to get on the freeway corridor and there are times when those meter delays can reach up to 20 minutes of delays to try to get through the ramp queues. I'm showing the slides here with the conclusion that actually we did not end up using the Tom-Tom data set. The point I want to make is you have to know what the data set is that you are using and how to apply it. What we discovered is what zero. Has purchased for Tom-Tom wasn't actual raw data. They purchased a simplified data set that looked at volume or speed trends on links and fit a profile to that that would be representative to that type of link. As we try to pinpoint bottlenecks we were able to get that out of that particular Tom-Tom data set that the lesson is make sure you know what you're looking at when you obtain these different travel time data sets.
Finally the third thing are actually the fourth thing that we've looked at, was incident data. What is happening in the freeway corridor or that is leading to these reliability issues. We were able to look at crash history archive, as well as an event summary. Winter lanes are getting close and how often is it happening? What we were able to find to that analysis is on an average week day in the 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. window, there is somewhere in the freeway network in the Westside of consolidation a lane closure almost every weekday. It could be a five-minute closure, it could be an hour closure. It could be from a crash or debris but what we know is there is some sort of lane closure event happening during that peak period.
With that type of analysis what do we know about this report and what are the real challenges. We confirmed that yes we have limited group choice. There is a freeway corridor that often gets avoided and rural arterial court order that gets used instead. There are significant travel reliabilities on the freeway corridor that are causing that. We also know on our secondary corridor we have some issues related to the rural road designs and there are political issues with that wrote caring that type traffic through a rural area including rural communities and how that is supported by those areas. The picture I have on the top right shows a truck that overturned the try to navigate down that road way and we also learned that access to the freeway system and we have that impact. Those were our key issues we identified. So then we went to a process to say how do we fix it? And again we are looking for things we can do within the next five years and things that would be affordable and we combed the earth in terms of ideas that are out there from the regional transportation plan down to local agency transportation plan. I TS or two small strategies and we said over this whole area what are all the project ideas out there and we screen them to say which ones would really make a difference on travel time or travel time reliability. When we did that we wanted projects that would really move the needle on those metrics. If there was a project that looked at a bottlenecked in their section and was a project at a right turn lane and that right turn lane would add some travel time benefit say 15 seconds of an average trip, which has not moved the needle in our context. We are looking at roughly an hour shift end-to-end so we are looking at things that would shave 5 to 15 minutes of the travel time for things it was significantly benefit the reliability am travel time. As we screen all those we came up with three strategies that we thought would move the needle. One was improve or enhance travel information to help people choose the right route on any given day. The second was addressing the impacts of the ramp meters and looking at a truck freight ramp meter bypass during those peak periods in the third is getting at the reliability issues on the freeway corridor in looking at enhance incident response. Differs when enhance information, we identified the need for improving how we get information to the corridors and carriers. That could be handled by variable message signs like a half shell and below or that could be an app where a driver can login and get information that you disseminate only to a subset of people that tell us them which route to get on. The politics of that role play into what the right strategy might be. But in the end we need something that improves our detection and congestion system and improves how we can give that information to people before their point of decision on which route they are going to get on. Second strategy rant meter bypass lanes. We've talked with the local agency about the feasibility of this but it would include building and extra lean on the arterial corridor leading up to the interchange as well as an additional lane going through the ramp meter signal itself and would have to likely include some photo enforcements or some electronic card reader to allow this to work efficiently. But potentially saving up to I say 20 minutes travel time for using the freeway corridor. The third strategy gets to the reliability issues related to incidents and what we talked about in our report was looking at improve detection of incidents and looking at how do we reduce impacts of that delay.
Do we enhance the freeway service patrol within the area? Do we coordinate with our emergency response teams and have strategies for how we can clear those sooner? Of the needs develop that into the system. Those are the three key things we came up with that we thought we could do in five years. We do have some exciting news to share about an early success coming out of this and that is that the Oregon Department of Transportation Washington County that's out on the left side leveraged our work to apply for a Tiger grant to help with traffic management system and I TS strategy on that corridor containing the Westside Street to the PDF's freight so they received a $10 million grant and we just initiated design of this strategy that will include variable message signs, potentially advisory speed signs of the freeway corridor to smooth traffic flows. Consider truck signal priorities on the arterial corridors to move the freight along and active traffic signal management and improved system performance monitoring. A huge success for the region would be to obtain dollars to make it a reality.
Final note I want to make is this effort was very collaborative which means public agencies and some private sector companies including Intel who was on our advisory committee, bookings Institute, greater Portland business Oregon consortiums and so it was a really a great effort were a lot of agencies come together. How do we support and look across jurisdictional boundaries and come up with a set of coherent strategies to make it work better. With that, Jennifer, I will turn it back over to you.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you, Chris. We have a few questions typed in Chris, this one came in during your presentation so I will put it out to and the other presenters are welcome to jump in as well. The question is: How do we capture the value to the private shipper/business entity if the improvement includes a public investment?
Chris Maciejewski
I'm not an economist so that's an interesting question I am not sure how you would directly measure that. I know there are models of that which generate some economic value data. The EDR resource group can develop economics. As far as I know you would be looking at tools like that.
Jennifer Symoun
Adie, Joseph, or Bruce any thoughts on that one?
Adie Tomer
This is Adie from Brookings. I think the most conventional says right here is a base that's direct. The example we are seeing with the Miami port tunnel which at the time I believe was the single largest PPP of its type in the country. I think it's now being exceeded but its moving trucks from local delivery routes onto something more direct for the port and they are charging the user base for. So it's a combination of public funds with private but they are able to directly pass on the benefit. There are all kinds of ways and we can use intelligence transportation system and monitoring and that's an exciting example because of their advancement on PMT fees. Greater right now for passengers but it's a potential with their attitudes to potentially move that to trucking. You can also use that as an opportunity to pass on benefits and the costs that are incurred by them directly.
Jennifer Symoun
Alright, thank you. Let's see. Adie and Joseph a question came in during your presentation. The FAF data is not enough for planning on Metropolitan region. Do you have any suggestions to use other data sources for it?
Joseph Kane
Yeah, this is Joe speaking. We realize that ourselves because that is actually why we developed our own trade database to get that added granularity that we can't really see and I think in many ways kind of making those connections to the underlying economic factors and I think it kind of also coincides with our call that we do need more detailed and more regular updates to the data we have on hand whether that is through CSS or a private data storage. I think all different options need to be considered.
Jennifer Symoun
Another question for both of you: how would freight funding formulas take into account states that aren't prominent for origin or destination, but through which lots of freight flows?
Adie Tomer
This is Adie. I think Bruce's presentation kind of provided some really strong visual evidence of how some states really tend to have, that's their role. I think our counter to it is not about data quality but it's really about what makes a place or quarter national significance what we tried to gain from our investments. Our point of view and this is it's really about looking for inefficiencies. So get what we are looking for now is reliability and efficiency. And predominantly that is sites actual production and consumption and we would include in the bucket also consolidated warehousing and other logistics activities. Whether that's Riverside or Memphis or low, our database tends to. Up on those trade flows where there is a light value added, but not necessarily local consumption or production of goods. We actually think the capital funding should be geared toward the markets. Understanding congestion bottlenecks, of course with the massive caveat that if we have better performance data in understand where bottlenecking and other congested related.
My comment is that part of the federal program when you originally go back to first principles was to make sure that coordination across state boundaries was done so that state aid would not be building a road and another state would be building another road to another city but to make sure that both had connectivity over state lines. So I think that the federal program has got to recognize that it's almost as if we have to think through do we make the corridors work? Do we make the networks work? Like for instance let's say like Arkansas that has a tremendous amount of through traffic coming through Texas and it goes through Arkansas and has a lot of overhead traffic and Arkansas. How do we help Arkansas. The question is do we need to have another interstate bypass to Fayetteville as we look at the closures that they had over the White River and those other rivers we received bridges, you are having diversion of trucks three or four hundred miles away when one piece of infrastructure goes out in the quarter that doesn't have redundancy and it. Maybe the question is not so much focusing on this is the network but maybe there might be some gaps that we need to look at redundancy in the network orders some other -- identifying some of the gaps that could help some of these through state manage traffic that may go away from their urban areas or better facilitate more efficient movements.
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. Bruce, a question for you: what is the source of the data behind the slide showing "Where is it going?"
Bruce Lambert
Okay. That is the same thing for the source for the truck shipments. The framework spends a lot of data and you have to know how to make it yield into submission to give you the answer you want. So like 50 Shades of Grey, since everyone's talking about it, 50 Sheets of data.
Jennifer Symoun
See, that's the only time that 50 Shades of Grey has been mentioned in relation to freight. The next question, where do we find through freight data for a given state that Bruce that came up during your presentation.
Bruce Lambert
Basically you're going to have to evaluate what type of information you are looking at. If you are in a state that has a tremendous amount of through data, you can look at the other states and what they've done in their state freight plans, you can look at the fact in the common analysis and you can do location quotient data that's posted on the Bureau of Census and the Bureau of economic analysis so there's a tremendous amount of data out there. The problem is it is not necessarily geared and transportation context. So whatever you do you're going to have to recognize that there is going to be multipliers and there is going to be additional listing necessary to take that data and align it along some type of geography.
Jennifer Symoun
Another question for you, Bruce: What would you suggest as a solution for port concentrations relative to labor disputes?
Bruce Lambert
This is interesting. We've already seen this and a lockout occurred in 2002 and you sought tempers divert cargo to New York some going to the southeast some going to the Gulf Coast. So basically shippers already started the process of looking at alternatives. But one of the things that is happening now is as the port strike is occurring and the labor disputes and the congestion and while all this is going on, what we are not talking about is has China peaked? How much incremental new growth will come out of China with how much will come out of near shoring are Southeast Asia. Things that may not move off the West Coast but may move off the eastern coast are Gulf Coast. It is interesting that we are talking about that. The firms started moving away but one of the problems is that already invested so much in their facilities, even if there's labor shortages the is still going to take a while to fully realign their warehouse and distribution networks to comfort different points of entry and different sources. It still may be several years before firms have really relocated sourcing and relocated a distribution network to account for handling multiple activities and at the same time firms are thinking about e-commerce and Omni channel marketing and how are they going to move from distribution to the customer. In a sense the traditional big bulk cargo moving to distribution Center in dispersed out, a lot of firms are playing with what does that model look like for the final shipment and final delivery. I really think that the labor disputes are going to force firms to more fully be more rapidly try to address where do they go forward in the distribution network?
Jennifer Symoun
Thank you. We don't have any more questions at this point. We have a few more minutes left so feel free to type in another question. At this point we will see if anyone has any questions on the phone.
I think we will go ahead and end up for the day. Thank you to all of our presenters and thank you everybody for attending today. Recording will be available online within the next few weeks and I will send out an e-mail once they are available. The next seminar will be held on March 18th and will be about the Maritime administration strong port program. Registration is not yet available but they will be sent out to the listserv announcing registration once it's open. I also want to mention for those of you applying for credits, this webinar is now on the calendar so you should be able to log your credits right after the seminar that directions for doing so are in the box at the bottom right corner and I just want to encourage you to sign up for the freight planning list serve if you haven't done already -- if you haven't already done so. The list serve as the primary means of talking freight and registration as well as other freight topics. With that, we will go ahead and end for the day. Thank you and enjoy the rest of your day.
